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MAN'S 
UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

The Psychoanalysis of Spiritism 



BY 

WILFRID LAY, Ph.D 

Author of "Man's Unconscious Conflict," "The Child's Unconscious 
Mind," and "Man's Unconscious Passion" 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1921 



■pf> 







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COPYBIGHT, 1921, 

Br DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 



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APR -5 1921 



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PREFACE 

From the point of view indicated in Chapter III, 
namely that the energy expended by psychics and 
psychical researchers, in attempting to prove im- 
mortality and the various other phenomena, is a 
conscious desire prompted by an unconscious fear, 
and is therefore an activity really not in line with 
the constructive employment of the libido, it will be 
evident that I approach the discussion of spiritistic 
phenomena with a certain natural reluctance; be- 
cause I do not wish to be accused of an undue in- 
terest in either the validity or the invalidity of the 
alleged proofs. 

On a subject in which all my unconscious desire 
would be centred, if consciousness permitted me to 
know that a proof was available, I do not, from 
one point of view, wish to be heard at all. But it 
has seemed to me that enough importance, to make 
it wholly worth while, attaches to the question 
which one might, as a student of psychoanalysis, 
put to the psychical researchers, namely, How can 
you say so confidently that such and such things 
have happened when we really, as yet, know so little 
about the part played in all these phenomena by the 
unconscious wishes of the medium and of the ob- 
servers? 



CONTENTS 

PART I. CONSCIOUSNESS 

PASS 

I The Stream of Consciousness 13 

1. The Feeling of Reality 20 

2. Meaning 22 

3. Degrees of Reality Feeling 23 

4. Feeling of Sameness 25 

5. Deja Vue 26 

6. Absence of Sameness 28 

7. Peculiarity of Sameness 29 

8. Feelings Are Sensations 31 

9. Reality Feeling an Internal Sensation . . 34 

10. The Panorama 36 

11. Hallucinations 39 

12. Reality Feeling and Images 41 

13. The Feelings and the Emotions .... 42 

14. Complexity of Consciousness 44 

15. Feeling of Reality Detachable .... 47 

II Emotions 56 

1. Emotions Contribute Energy .... 57 

2. Emotions Indefinite 59 

3. Emotions and Unity of Function ... 60 

4. The Objective Situation 62 

5. The Conflict 63 

6. Fear 65 

PART II. 
THE UNCONSCIOUS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 

III Psychoanalysis 73 

1. Ignorance About Psychoanalysis ... 74 

2. Spiritism and Love 75 

7 



t/ 



8 CONTENTS 

PAOB 

3. What Psychoanalysis Is Not 76 

4. Repression 78 

5. The Medium 86 

6. Unconscious Trends 87 

IV The Unconscious as an Urge 93 

1. Resistance to Knowledge ...... 93 

2. Complexity 99 

3. Non-Conscious Ideas and Feelings . . . 101 

4. Reassoeiation of Ideas 106 

5. Occurrence 107 

6. Current Conscious Psychology .... 114 

7. The Unconscious an Hypothesis .... 117 

8. An Illustration 118 

9. Accidents 121 

10. Another Illustration 123 

11. Magnification 130 

12. Limit on Size 134 

13. Fission and Fusion 136 

14. The Unconscious as Omnipercipient . . . 138 

15. The Medium as Unconscious 141 

16. Unconscious Wishes 143 

V Mechanisms 147 

1. Association 147 

2. Humans Subject to Natural Law . . . 151 

3. Personality 153 

4. Unconscious Memory 157 

5. Earliest Sensations 160 

6. Introjection 161 

7. Projection 165 

8. Animism 168 

9. Attitude Toward Departed 170 

10. Science and the Reality Feeling . . . 171 

11. Science and Projection . ^ 173 

12. Reality Thinking and Life 176 

13. The Reality Feeling vs. Reality Thinking . 178 

14. Unconscious Perceptions 181 

15. Reading Mechanisms 182 



CONTENTS 9 

PAGE 

16. The Unconscious Combination of Ideas . . 187 

17. Miracles 189 

18. Desire for the Extraordinary .... 191 

19. Desire for Excitement 193 

20. Transference 195 

VI Unconscious Emotions and Will 201 

1. The Conflict-Split Character 201 

2. The Postural Tonus 202 

3. Emotion a Change of Relation .... 204 

4. Repression 207 

5. Repression and Conflict 209 

6. Emotion Unceasing 212 

7. Emotion and Health 215 

8. Fear 216 

9. Will 218 

10. Will and Emotion 220 

11. Images and Will 224 

12. Recalling a Name 226 

13. Freedom of the Will 232 

14. The Unconscious Will 232 

15. Summary 235 

16. Telepathy .237 

17. Pleasure-Pain vs. Reality Principle . . . 240 

PART III. THE UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

VII Belief Before Knowledge . 247 

1. Belief 247 

2. Fear of Death 248 

3. Continuousness of Urge 251 

4. Verbal Expression ......... 256 

5. Belief and Wish 259 

6. Sadistic Wish 260 

7. Spiritism and War 263 

VIII Knowledge Above Belief 265 

1. Ambivalence 265 

2. A Mental Microscope 266 



10 CONTENTS 

PAGX 

3. The Neurotic 268 

4. The Normal Compulsion 271 

5. The Taboo 271 

6. The Totem . " 273 

7. "Spirit" a Projection 275 

8. Repression of Mating Instinct .... 279 v' 

9. Belief Is Not Knowledge 284 

IX Man's Unconscious Spieit 286 

1. Divisions of Psychical Research .... 286 

2. Unwarranted Inferences 288 

3. Narrowing of Consciousness 291 

4. Transfer of Reality Feeling 294 

5. Relativity of Images 297 

X Scientific Investigations 300 

1. The Personal Factor in Science .... 300 

2. Exclusion of Unconscious Factor . . . 303 

3. Belief a Wish 307 

4. Dr. Q/s Case 311 

5. Elsa Barker 315 

6. The Value of Phantasy 321 

XI Peesent Status 325 

1. The Medium's Material Reward .... 325 

2. Physical Manifestations 326 

3. What Is "Spirit"? 327 

4. Quality of Content 328 

5. Infantility in Civilized Spirit World . . 331 

6. Reality Thinking 334 



PART I 
CONSCIOUSNESS 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

CHAPTER I 

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

If at the end of a busy day we reflect upon what 
have been the day's experiences, we are struck with 
the constant change of sensations, from sight to 
sound, to touch, to taste, to smell, to pleasure, to 
pain, and so on incessantly. The busiest days in 
which we hurry from one detail of routine to an- 
other or pass from one exciting scene into another, 
leave no opportunity for imagination. When rest 
finally comes, we find ourselves thinking over the 
many incidents and, like the flickerings of a dying 
fire, our memories spontaneously flash into con- 
sciousness, and then vanish, in an apparently in- 
coherent manner. Like a string still vibrating, 
after we have set it in motion by our day's activities, 
our minds naturally reverberate the events of the 
day, and we finally prepare our minds for sleep. 
We might say that during the day we have sen- 
sations of various kinds, and, at the end of it, 
memories, that have come to us in our moments of 
relaxation. 

For some people the easiest thing in the world to 
do is to sit and day-dream. This habit is formed 
early in life, but, even in later life, when the de- 

13 



14 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

mands of the environment are so exacting that we 
have to exercise control over our thoughts as vigor- 
ously as we can, the natural relaxation, which has 
however in some highly trained minds become prac- 
tically impossible, is to let our thoughts come on, 
as they will, a process which in the general run of 
people, takes place through the medium of desultory 
conversation. In all the trains of thought there are 
apparent gaps, breaks, incoherences, the causes of 
which will later become apparent to the reader. 

If we relax our thoughts to the utmost, which can 
best be done alone or with some completely trusted 
person, and examine the stream of ideas, which 
comes of its own accord, without any effort on our 
part, we may notice, if we take the trouble to ob- 
serve, that these ideas are now visual, now auditory 
and again have other qualities, different from either 
of these. The different qualities of consciousness 
are, to careful introspection, much more numerous 
than the ordinarily accepted " five " senses. 

What I shall have to say about the specifically 
different qualities of consciousness applies equally 
to sensations and ideas. But before attempting to 
enumerate and name these different qualities which 
consciousness, whether idea or sensation, presents, 
we shall have to make a distinction between idea 
and sensation and discuss two theories about them. 

When I look at an object, and all my attention is 
centred on the visual appearance of it, I may say 
that my consciousness is mainly, if not entirely, 
visual in quality. It yet may have elements of 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 15 

other qualities in it, interspersed in temporal 
sequence, with brief periods of existence. But 
though these others, the sounds, smells, touches and 
innumerable feelings of all kinds exist in the 
stream, they are so brief as to be insignificant, and 
may be likened to the cessations in impulse between 
the alternations of an electric current. 

When I hear music, at an orchestral concert, for 
example, and fix my eyes upon some single point, as 
the conductor's score, and the whole concert room 
becomes an indefinite blur of light, my conscious- 
ness is mainly, if not entirely, a consciousness of 
sound. If then the music stops and I look at my 
companion's face, my consciousness may be said to 
change from an auditory to a visual quality. Thus 
my consciousness changes all day long, as I go 
through the multitude of the day's experiences, 
from one sense quality to another. 

At times the stream of consciousness, as I see it 
in *ny own case, is like a thread on which are strung 
various coloured beads. If the stream of conscious- 
ness is mainly visual (most of the beads being one 
colour, say white), there may be a bead or two of 
some other colour or colours between the white 
ones. But as these beads pass at the rate of a hun- 
dred or so a second, the presence of a blue bead in a 
white section is naturally not noticed. Or if we say 
auditory sensations are represented by blue beads, 
then a few white ones interspersed with the blue 
would hardly be noticed. At other times the 
stream of consciousness is like a number of such 



16 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

strings of beads,, each a different colour, from one 
of which strings the attention goes to another, 
while yet the bulk of them are fancied to be in con- 
sciousness all the time, because the transitions from 
one to another are so instantaneous. 

This is a series of changes in quality. But there 
is also another change, which might be called a 
quantity change. The actual sight of one thing 
may become so subsidiary and unimportant for me 
that it becomes less in intensity than a mere visual 
thought. An example of this is the familiar phe- 
nomenon observed in silent reading, where the 
actual sight of the printed page has less visual 
validity than the visual images that are evoked in 
the reader's mind by the description he is reading. 

In this case the visual mental image may blot out 
entirely the sight of the page, although the reading 
goes on automatically, the pages are turned and the 
reader is oblivious of all except the scenes of the 
story he is reading. I think he may truly be said 
then to be conscious only of the subjective phan- 
tasy which the actual printed page arouses in him, 
and to be quite unconscious of the occurrence of 
external stimuli to his sense organs of all types 
including the visual stimuli of the black letters on 
the white page. His consciousness may therefore 
be not only visual in quality, but at times auditory 
or any other. It is also subjective in quantity. 

The visual images are obviously not the only 
quality of subjective consciousness that we have, 
for we have in our mind's ear at times the sounds 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17 

of nature, of musical themes ; we may also have in 
mind the odours of the country or the city and the 
mental images, as I shall call these subjective in- 
tensities of the same quality, for every different 
quality of objective consciousness. 

Thus we ride up in an express elevator and re- 
ceive actual impressions of pressure on our joints 
and of translation through space coming from the 
semicircular canals of the ears ; we ride down in a 
fast elevator and feel the very peculiar sensation 
of a sudden and gradually diminished fall, as the 
elevator slows; and later, when thinking about it, 
we have mental images of the rise and the fall. 

We have other sensations coming both from with- 
out the body and within it, sensations different 
from the ordinary five senses and really amounting 
in number of specific qualities to over twenty. In 
addition to these we have not only sight and sound 
and joint pressure and translation, but all the other 
qualities, in that diminished intensity not con- 
nected with external stimuli occurring at the time, 
an intensity I have referred to above as the mental 
image. My own experience and that of many other 
persons I have interrogated is that most of the sen- 
sations actually experienced may be later revived 
in the shape of mental images, so that it will easily 
be conceivable by any one, even if he has noticed 
the images in himself, that they are possible, at 
least, as occurrences in the conscious life of others, 
who may be more introspective. 

I am obliged to admit that there are persons 



18 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

who not only say they have no mental images, but 
also maintain that others cannot possibly have 
them. I confess I do not understand their argu- 
ments any more than I should understand the argu- 
ment of a man born blind, who tried to convince me 
that there is no such sense as sight, for I feel that 
it is a poor argument, and that it is frequently 
illogical to try to prove a negative statement. 

Whether those persons who deny the existence 
of mental images have them or not, they must have 
conscious memories, that come to their minds in 
some shape; and my experience is that they come 
now in one sense quality and now in another, in 
constant succession, interspersed with impressions 
of external origin, a stream ever changing in qual- 
ity and intensity. Each quality, whether it be sen- 
sation or feeling, may have the intensity usually 
associated with the reality feeling (see Sec. 1) and 
be regarded as an objective truth. A hallucination 
is therefore the occurrence of an image, or series or 
group of images, with the reality feeling. An illu- 
sion is the concurrence of an external sensation 
with an image, or of two or more external sensa- 
tions which interact upon each other in such a way 
as to arouse and lull the reality feeling, in asso- 
ciation with contradictory impressions, almost at 
the same time. 

The main divisions of the qualities of conscious- 
ness as I have observed them in myself are, as far 
as I am able to distinguish them, the following : 



THE STKEAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 



Qualities 



Senses 



Feelings 



1. Sight 

2. Hearing 

3. Smell 

4. Taste 

5. Skin (Passive) 1 ~ , 

• _, / a /• n fOutaneous 

6. Pressure (Active) J 

7. Heat 

8. Cold 

9. Tendinous 

10. Articular 

11. Muscular 

12. Hunger 

13. Thirst 

14. Sex 

15. Dizziness 

16. Nausea 

17. Pleasure 

18. Pain 

19. Feeling of sameness 

20. Feeling of Reality 

21. Feeling of Will 

22. Emotions 



I should call different colours and shades of the 
same colour, also the various odours, etc., sub- 
qualities. 

My experience is that the feeling of sameness and 
the feeling of reality are qualities that may, under 
appropriate circumstances, occupy the focus of at- 
tention and thus be the only sense quality in con- 
sciousness for certain brief periods. As will later 
appear, this is a most important point in consider- 
ing the validity of the so-called proofs of the ex- 
istence of disembodied spirit. 



20 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

§ 1. The Feeling of Reality 

If we look long enough through a telescope at a 
detail of a distant scene, the reality of that scene 
is at its height at the beginning of the view, and 
diminishes toward the end on account of the re- 
peated visual impressions being unaccompanied by 
auditory and other ones. In looking at a stereo- 
scopic view there is a similar and very striking 
diminuendo in the internal sensation called in con- 
sciousness the feeling of reality. There is first 
a strong feeling of reality caused by the unusual- 
ness of the third dimension illusion in the photo- 
graph, as one notices, for instance, how clearly the 
man in the picture stands out from the background. 
But, after a few seconds, the feeling of reality pales 
rapidly, on noticing the motionlessness of the man. 
This paling of interest is due to the lack of the in- 
ternal sensations usually connected with a real 
sight. When they fail, interest is gone. In the 
moving pictures the movements maintain the feel- 
ing of reality quite strongly until there comes a 
" close up " of some one speaking, or of a dog bark- 
ing, when the feeling of reality is at once lessened, 
because the sound of the voice or of the dog's bark 
is not heard. 

The feeling of reality is just as different from the 
sense of sight, to take any sense at random, as sight 
is different from hearing. I have mentioned else- 
where the fact that part of the meaning of a sight 
is its sound value, another part of its meaning is its 
smell value or its taste value, its touch value — 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 21 

value here being what associations of other sense 
qualities it has acquired and, as it were, made a 
part of itself. Similarly part of the meaning of a 
sound is its visual value or the sights associated 
with it. It is obvious that these values may be 
quite different for one person from what they are 
for another, depending on the different experience 
of the persons. 

The meaning for the internal sensations attained 
by a sight, a sound, a taste, a smell or a touch is 
sometimes its reality, sometimes its identity. It is 
inconceivable that any sense might not have a value 
acquired from any other sense, and that any sense 
does not have implicitly and unconsciously the 
value of all and each of the various internal sensa- 
tions, as they are all present all the time. That is, 
the strongest meaning of any sight for one person 
may be the sounds associated with it, for another 
the smells associated with it, for another the cuta- 
neous or kinesthetic sensations. An important 
source of meaning for odours is the internal or or- 
ganic sensations aroused by them. 

The meaning of a sight is sometimes built up of 
the auditory sensations of words associated with it. 
And the meaning of a word for a given individual 
consists of the visual, auditory and all other sensa- 
tions associated in his own mind with that particu- 
lar word and individual. This is why the same 
word has different shades of meaning for different 
people, and why words are so unstable in their 
meaning while quite identical in their form. 



22 MANS UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

§ 2. Meaning 

And the growth of society as an organism is 
partly dependent on these associations with words 
( which themselves are identical ) being made up in 
the majority of people by preponderatingly similar 
groups of visual, auditory, etc., and organic sen- 
sations. 

Unless the word " thief " was able to waken in 
the majority of people's minds an unpleasant or- 
ganic sensation, it would not mean what it does and 
people would not react toward it as they do. One 
can see the associations collect about a word that 
has not before had them, or which has lost them for 
centuries, e. g., the word " Hun," to which have been 
added as meaning, the organic reactions aroused by 
the Lusitania, by liquid fire, by poison gas, and 
many other acts which were designed by the Ger- 
man mind to arouse these organic reactions that 
they do and others, such as fear, which they do not. 

It is obvious, too, that the Hun himself, thinking 
so much about fear in the other fellow, must have 
counted it unconsciously very large in himself. 
Only because to his own soul would it make a com- 
pelling appeal, could he have thought it out as a 
motive force in others. As soon as the word 
" Schrecklichkeit " went around the world, one 
could have known that that was the way for the 
Allies, had they been so low-minded as to use it, to 
make the deepest impression on the mind of the 
Boche. 

What war meant to the allied mind is the emo- 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 23 

tions aroused by a just war of defence. To the 
Allies war was warding or guarding, with all that 
implies both of what is warded off and what is 
guarded in the shape of the morally inalienable. 
The reality feeling, a variety of internal sensa- 
tion, associated with a sight, is no variation of the 
visual quality itself. The faint blue of distant 
mountains is just as real a sight, no matter how 
pale, as is the brilliance of a rose petal held near 
the eye. And the actual tone of the colour may be 
exactly reproduced in a coloured photograph or in 
a scene in a theatre. But the holding of the photo- 
graph in the hand, or the sitting in a badly venti- 
lated auditorium, are factors in the total situation 
which cause internal sensations, whether conscious 
or not, that diminish the sense of reality by being 
exceptions to that sense which we should have if we 
were sitting or walking in the country and looking 
at real distant mountains. The realness of the 
visual impression is measured only by the other 
impressions simultaneous with the visual. 

§ 3. Degrees of Reality Feeling 

There are thus various categories or degrees of 
reality perceptible in connection with sight and de- 
pendent on the coexistence of fewer or more numer- 
ous internal sensations. The sight alone of a per- 
son who is standing, but motionless, has a degree of 
reality mediated through a feeling of sameness, a 
sameness with a previous visual impression that 
has been received simultaneously with other im- 



24 MANS UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

pressions, sights, sounds and all the rest. This de- 
gree of reality feeling is augmented by the sight of 
his movements. If he were chopping wood and I 
could not hear the sound of his blows, even though 
he was within hearing, my sense of his reality would 
be altered, diminished. If I hear the blows, and 
hear him whistle or talk or sing, these are addi- 
tional factors in the total of the reality feeling, 
which receives quite a shock, if any one of these 
factors and many others, are lacking from the en- 
semble. Of course, there are persons whose reality 
contains the internal sensations from more of these 
physical factors than does that of others. 

Here emerges the relation between desire and 
reality, for reality, thus regarded, seems but the 
gratification of desire or of the unconscious wish. 
The reality of the particular individual cannot be 
other than the sum of the internal sensations as- 
sociated with the stimuli of his environment, re- 
actions which come to specific form only in pre- 
sentations and representations. These are deter- 
mined by his birth, bringing up and education and 
are the only means whereby he can judge the reality 
of his impressions. To the man with a physically 
defective eye, one who, for example, is colour blind, 
reality is different from that of an artist who, start- 
ing though he may with an innate weakness in col- 
our discrimination, has, by compensation of con- 
stant attention, so refined his sensibilities as to 
excel the average man. 

The world, to a hypothetical man who has a sense 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 25 

not possessed by other men, say, for example, one 
that would enable him to read the mind of whomso- 
ever he chose, would be a world having more reality 
than the ordinary man's world. Thus we might 
truthfully say that the more senses the more reality, 
and that the perfectly real world would exist only 
to the omnipercipient, to coin a word on the analogy 
of omniscient, which does not seem to mean exactly 
what I have in mind. This implies that the more 
one knows about the world, the more real it is, and 
that the ignorant live in a world of unreality, as 
they " know so many things that aren't so." 

Actual reality, as distinguished from the purely 
subjective reality feeling here described, is the re- 
lation of cause and effect, extensity, intensity of 
things external to the ego, relations which are made 
manifest to the ego only when it thinks or perceives 
in accordance with the reality principle, to be more 
fully described in a later section (Chap. VI, Sec. 
16). 

§ 4. Feeling of Sameness 

The feeling of sameness includes the feeling of 
similarity, for similarity is but partial identity. 
The feeling of partial or complete identity is one 
that functions daily in all our discriminations and 
classifications and regulates our conduct hourly 
and our actions every second. It operates both in 
and out of consciousness, generally out, as when we 
are sorting things, such as separating a pack of 
cards into its four suits, where we are consciously 



26 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

absorbed in the external action of putting a heart 
with the other hearts, a diamond in the pile of 
diamonds, etc., and the feeling of sameness which 
governs our actions does not appear in conscious- 
ness. 

But, like any other feeling, this feeling can re- 
ceive the full light of consciousness, as in certain 
discrimination tests. For example when we are 
given a number of pill boxes containing, some dif- 
ferent, and others the same, weight of lead, we are 
voluntarily attending to this feeling, as we lift now 
one, now another. 

The feeling of sameness bursts upon us with sur- 
prising force and apparently unconnected with ex- 
ternal experiences in the deja vue situation. 

I have mentioned elsewhere the effect of the feel- 
ing of reality upon the opinions of men and the es- 
sential difference between the feeling of reality 
and the perception of the relations of things. It 
may be objected that the feeling of sameness also 
mentioned may be quite the same feeling as the feel- 
ing of reality, and that when we experience what 
I call the feeling of reality, we may be having a 
feeling of the sameness of this experience, in its es- 
sential feelings, with a previous experience. As a 
matter of fact, the two feelings are different, as is 
shown by the deja vue experience, which, as it may 
not be familiar to every one, I will describe. 

§ 5. Deja Vue 

Many of us have had a sudden feeling that a sit- 
uation in which we find ourselves is the same as 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 27 

one we have been in before, although we know that 
this could not possibly be the case. I am talking 
with some one whom I have never met before, in a 
place I have never been before, about something 
I have never before discussed, when suddenly I am 
impressed with a feeling which I know to be con- 
trary to actual fact — a feeling which, for the mo- 
ment, gives me the impression that just now every- 
thing is a repetition, an exact replica, of a situation 
that I have been in before at some time. The feel- 
ing of sameness in these so-called deja vue sit- 
uations is exceedingly strong for a brief period — 
a few seconds — but it in no way affects the feeling 
of reality, which remains constant throughout, 
maintaining itself through the multitudinous 
changes of sensations — from one colour to another, 
from sight to sound, etc., and back again. The 
reality feeling retains, I think, in the average hu- 
man, and particularly in the tough-minded type, 
a more even level of constancy than any other feel- 
ing. 

Only when something happens which is a sudden 
and catastrophic blow to our wishes, such as some 
rapid and stupendous loss, of a friend or a fortune 
or a life partner, does the feeling of reality fluctuate 
with huge undulations. Now we cannot believe 
the facts to be true, and now we cannot doubt the 
evidence of our senses and the corroborative force 
of many concomitant circumstances. Our wishes, 
conscious and unconscious, struggle in a seething 
mass with the feelings of reality, which are reani- 



28 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

mated again and again by repeated stimuli from the 
external world. 

Thus, in the dejd vue situation, the feeling of 
familiarity (or sameness), which is a specific feel- 
ing and like no other sense quality, i. e., is not sight 
or hearing itself, but is an internal sensation, had 
functioned without stimulus, or at any rate with- 
out the usual stimulus, but with another. Of 
course it is possible that in the situation felt as 
similar or identical, there may be enough elements, 
in different factors of the situation, that are similar 
or analogous, to create a sort of summation of 
stimuli sufficient to evoke, in the internal sensa- 
tions, that reaction which is known to me as the 
feeling of sameness, and this, even though the actual 
situation is really different in other respects. 

The feeling of sameness and the feeling of reality 
are related in that there is a sameness experienced 
in the repeated functioning of the reality feeling 
occurring uniformly on perception of external stim- 
uli. The very existence of sameness might almost 
be said to be the backbone of the reality feeling. 
And, from another point of view, too, reality is 
measured by uniformity. The greatest degree of 
objective reality is dependent on universality or 
conformity to natural law. 

§ 6. Absence of Sameness 

And the noticed absence of the feeling of same- 
ness gives a sense of unreality in the following 
situation. One wakes up in a room that one has 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 29 

slept in for the first time. While it has been seen 
the night before, previous to going to sleep, there 
is for a moment no recognition of its being the same. 
It all looks strange and new. The internal sensa- 
tion that would ordinarily report the sameness has 
not yet waked up. To recognize that the room is 
the same, one has to have the feeling of sameness 
accompany the vision. But the feeling of sameness 
of visual sensations is not in the eye, for we have, 
in this illustration, the visual sensation (which is 
the same) but we have it without the feeling of 
sameness, which is here evidently absent. There- 
fore the two sensations of sight and of sameness are 
qualitatively different and are not reported by the 
same sense organ. 

The same sensation reported by the same sense 
organ, or in other words, a repeated identical stim- 
ulation, of the same external sense organ, does not 
constitute the feeling of sameness. It does, on the 
contrary, have the effect of difference, in the sense 
that presently there come no reports from the iden- 
tically stimulated organ. Consciousness leaves 
that organ and goes to some other, or to images, 
where the qualities may be different enough from 
each other to keep consciousness awake. 

§ 7. Peculiarity of Sameness 

Thus we see that the sense of sameness is of a 
different conscious quality from that of sight or 
sound or any other external sense, because, in the 
two illustrations, the deja vue situation and the 



30 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

situation of waking up in a room and not knowing 
where we are, we find it isolated in two different 
ways. In the deja vue situation we find it operat- 
ing very strongly where the external situation is 
demonstrably different in at least a large propor- 
tion of its elements. We find it operating, that is, 
where there is no external reason for it to do so. 

In the other situation we find it failing to operate 
where the visual situation is exactly the same as it 
was when we were last conscious of it, and where we 
ordinarily experience it at once, and regularly. 
The usual happening is to wake up all at once, so 
to speak, and be impressed with the reality and 
sameness of the surroundings we were in when we 
went to sleep, but, waking up visually before we 
wake as regards our internal sensations of same- 
ness, we see at once that the feeling of sameness 
is no part of the visual quality, though it is, on ordi- 
nary occasions, taken as a part of it. 

It will be seen later that I make this independent 
functioning of the sameness feeling and the reality 
feeling, apart from actual external stimuli, an im- 
portant argument, in the case of observers at a 
spiritistic seance, against believing the apparent 
evidence of the senses. If the sense of reality can 
be separated, and actually is accidentally separated 
from external stimuli and attached to something 
else — some other conscious sense quality — it will 
be evidently one of the mechanisms by which the 
medium and the sitters succeed in deceiving them- 
selves. 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 31 

§ 8. Feelings are Sensations 

What I wish to make as plain as possible is the 
evident fact that all the feelings are sensations, and 
have as much right to be consulted about certain 
truths as do the other sensations. As qualities of 
consciousness, one of them is, to the impartial ob- 
server, as clear and distinct as the other. 

Actual truth, however, is not a matter of the 
qualities of the stream of consciousness, but a mat- 
ter of laws of relations of those qualities. In what 
follows I shall endeavour to show that the spiritist 
accepts as actual truth the misinterpreted succes- 
sion of the qualities of his consciousness and makes 
on this basis deductions that are not valid in the 
sphere of thought in which the spiritist states they 
are valid. Thus I am willing to accept the state- 
ment of any spiritist that he saw (i. e., believed he 
saw) a table rise, or that he remembers certain 
things happening weeks or months ago; but I am 
not willing to accept his statement that if I, or some 
person who is even less than I under the influence of 
the unconscious, had been present, we should have 
seen the same thing. I know the large majority of 
spiritists are sincere and free from taint of fraud, 
which could be practised only by the unbeliever. 
But I also know that the interpretation of the 
various sense qualities of the individual who is 
present at a seance is a very delicate matter, and 
has not yet been subjected to adequate scientific 
tests with instruments of precision. 

By this I mean that the stream of consciousness 



32 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

of the ordinary observer at a seance is composed of 
the two elements of subjective and objective sensa- 
tion mentioned above as mental image and sensa- 
tion. Also, to use an indispensable metaphor, the 
sensations themselves come into the mind both from 
the body and from the external world. Further- 
more the sensations coming from the body itself in- 
clude the only criterion possessed by humans by 
which to judge of the objective reality of any of 
the other sensations. In other words the only 
criterion used in the seance is an internal feeling 
(the reality feeling) which is exactly on a par, as 
far as objective reality is concerned, with any other 
internal feeling. 

Add to this that the internal feelings, emanat- 
ing solely from the individual's body itself, are in- 
clusive of the emotions and the wishes and the de- 
sires, and we can clearly see how difficult it is, even 
for the most coldly and critically scientific of us to 
disentangle from the welter of organic sensations, 
emotions, feelings of sameness, etc., the actual feel- 
ing of reality that belongs to the sight or the sound 
in question. 

And this would make things bad enough for the 
truth, if it were a matter of this subjective reality 
feeling, but, as I have just indicated, scientific truth 
is an observed and recorded relation between sensa- 
tions and is not a sensation itself. As I see and 
read about spiritistic phenomena, I observe more ■ 
and more clearly that the accounts of them are 
really true enough accounts of the states of mind 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 33 

of the mediums and the observers. They certainly 
see what they see, and hear what they hear, and 
they tell us carefully what they see and hear. But 
I also see and hear wonderful things. I can see 
almost anything I wish to, in my mind's eye. 

I can hear anything I desire in my mind's ear, 
even melodies that have never been heard before 
by me or any one else, I can in my mind's tactual 
consciousness touch anything I want to, feel all de- 
grees of temperature, all sensations of motion, all 
excesses of pleasure or pain, in short, any experi- 
ence of whatever nature that I have had in the 
past or desire to have in the future, all by means 
of the imagery which, apparently at will, I can 
evoke whenever I have the leisure. But I have no 
interest in reporting these images as scientific 
truths valid for any other consciousness than my 
own. That they are absolutely incontrovertible 
scientific proofs for my own consciousness, no one 
will, I am sure, attempt to deny. 

In resume then let me repeat that I know I 
have visual sensations and visual images. Also I 
have auditory sensations and auditory images, and 
sensations and images of all the twenty-odd quali- 
ties of consciousness mentioned in the list given 
above ; but I will use the visual quality as an illus- 
tration, requesting my readers to substitute for 
u visual " any and every one of the others. 

I know I have visual sensations, and that with 
each visual sensation that I judge to be caused by 
an external stimulus comes the feeling of reality, 



34 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

which is not a visual sensation at all, but an en- 
tirely different quality of consciousness. But the 
feeling of reality not only does not coexist with 
every visual sensation but also actually appears at 
times when there is no visual impression being 
made on my retina at all. Ordinarily the reality 
feeling is so regularly the concomitant of the actual 
visual sensation that it is felt as a part of the sen- 
sation itself, is fused with it and is not analysed 
out, as it is spontaneously in the deja vue situation. 
But this and the day dream and the dream of the 
night show the reality feeling attaching itself to 
subjective sensations, to memories, to mental im- 
ages pure and simple. 

§ 9. Reality Feeling an Internal Sensation 

As this reality feeling is, however, while not a 
subjective sensation, an internal sensation arising 
in my own body, I am forced to take other criteria 
for the actual external reality of the visual sensa- 
tion, if I wish to be scientifically sure of the ex- 
istence of the object itself. Not that I need to do 
this every time or even frequently. In fact, I need 
to do it only when the visual sensation is of some- 
thing that appears to violate the previously ex- 
perienced order of visual sensations. Then, if I 
see something that appears quite unprecedented 
or impossible, I automatically test it out with other 
sense impressions of other qualities. Finally, if 
I cannot understand it even then, and cannot ex- 
plain it to myself as an illusion of the sense of 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 35 

sight, I have recourse to the opinions of other peo- 
ple and their observation and as a last resource 
to the instruments of precision of truly scientific 
research. 

In short, my reality feeling works pretty well 
in conjunction with vision in all the ordinary ex- 
periences of life. I believe it does also with other 
people and with other sense qualities of conscious- 
ness as well as vision. If every one else in the 
world were exactly like me in this respect, we 
should all be living contentedly the life of sensa- 
tions and perceptions and thoughts and images that 
has been lived by the majority of people for thou- 
sands of years. 

But from time immemorial there have always 
been people who have attempted to give objective 
validity to their visual and auditory images. Seers 
have seen visions and solitary hermits and others 
have heard voices, which means only that the feel- 
ing of reality has become detached from external 
sensation and, in more than ordinary intensity, has 
attached itself to some visual or auditory image. 

The cause of this transfer of association from the 
association of feeling of reality with external visual 
sensation to the association of feeling of reality 
with a visual image ( or its transfer from sensation 
to image in the auditory or any other quality) will 
be taken up in the second part of this book. Here, 
however, it should be said that in the nature of 
belief and in the relation which belief bears to the 
unconscious wish, there is an adequate and per- 



36 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

fectly comprehensible cause for the transfer, and 
that, given the unconscious, and the modes in which 
it operates, it is inevitable that in some persons it 
should not work out in attributing scientific reality 
to visual, auditory and other images, largely on 
account of a misunderstanding of what the term sci- 
entific reality means. 

The result, however, of this misunderstanding 
and misinterpretation has been the disagreement 
between the spiritist and the scientist. The former 
is virtually saying that the image, which I shall 
show later to be entirely the product of uncon- 
scious mental activity, and which is purely sub- 
jective in origin, is to be accepted as a scientific 
fact valid universally. On the other hand the sci- 
entist replies that it may be quite true that every 
one has visual and auditory images and also a feel- 
ing of reality, but the fact that A correlates his 
feeling of reality with certain of his visual images 
is no proof that B either will, or is obliged to, do 
the same thing. 

§ 10. The Panorama 

A further description of the reality feeling should 
include the fact that it is in general an impression 
on the internal sense organs felt simultaneously 
with an impression made by an external stimulus 
on the external sense organs. When we see a real 
sight, that is, when we have a real external im- 
pression, we generally have it accompanied with 
the internal sensation I have called the reality feel- 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 37 

ing. If it is a painting we are looking at, we are 
not deceived, that is, we do not have in connection 
with it, the feeling that it is an actual view, be- 
cause all the other visual impressions accompany- 
ing it are not consistent with its being, for example, 
a real country scene. The presence of a frame or, 
if it is unframed on an easel in a studio, the pres- 
ence of the other objects surrounding it, make it 
only a section of the total visual field. 

I remember my first visit to what was called a 
panorama, a huge painting on the inside of a cylin- 
der of canvas, the view of the top of which was cut 
off by the roof of the circular tower one entered, 
and climbed up to view this elaborate picture. The 
visitors could walk all around the balcony of this 
tower, and from any part of it they were approxi- 
mately equidistant, I believe about twenty -five feet, 
from the painting. Thus this picture gave no sec- 
tional impression. It was skilfully painted and 
was supposed faithfully to represent what would 
be seen by a person at the " Surrender of York- 
town " or the " Siege of Paris," if he stood at a cer- 
tain point and turned about through all the points 
of the compass. But the picture, while it gave the 
general visual appearance of reality, failed to 
arouse the complete reality feeling for at least two 
reasons I shall mention. The total reality feeling 
includes a combination of sensations of different 
sense qualities, and the feeling that a sight is real 
depends for its integrity and completeness on the 
simultaneous functioning of the appropriate activi- 



38 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ties of hearing and touch, not to include all the other 
external senses, which contribute each its share. 

The panorama lacked reality visually because, 
while I might imagine it to be real, if I stood still, 
the infinitesimal changes in relative position of 
the objects depicted, changes which would have 
taken place in reality, did not, if I moved, occur. 
For example, two distant trees, which, if they had 
been real, my movement of three or four feet to the 
left would have placed one behind the other or 
would have shifted very slightly, did not move at 
all, and this lack of movement on the trees- part an- 
nihilated the reality feeling by immediately arous- 
ing in me the sense of something " queer " about the 
visual impression per se. 

To this was added the fact that the voices of the 
spectators who were with me on the " observation 
tower " were reflected by the canvas, so that an 
auditory impression was present, which would not 
have occurred in the real place of the scene itself. 
Therefore in this picture, which was designed to 
awaken the reality feeling did so visually only in 
part, that is, when I kept absolutely motionless, 
and did not awaken that part of the total reality 
feeling which depends on sound. 

From an experience of out-doors reality lasting 
only a dozen years I had made enough associations 
between visual and other sense impressions to be 
struck with the unreality of something which would 
have deceived my eyes only if they had remained 
unmoved, and which presented other impressions 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 39 

to my external senses, that were contradictory to 
former experience, e. g., sound. Smell too was con- 
tradictory and the feeling of the air on my youth- 
ful cheeks was quite different from what it would 
have been in the open. 

The feeling, therefore, that any sight is the sight 
of a real thing depends upon concomitant impres- 
sions of hearing, temperature, air pressure and 
other qualities of conscious sensation. 

This is not to say that under abnormal condi- 
tions there may not be an utter absence of the real- 
ity feeling in the presence of real stimuli of all sense 
qualities otherwise making up the total reality feel- 
ing. We may be in such a subjective state at times 
that, while all the objects of our surroundings are 
making their specific appeal through our various 
avenues of sense, they still do not arouse the in- 
ternal feeling of reality. It is not difficult to cite 
cases of this. An example is the waking up in a 
room, above mentioned, and seeing the objects in it 
and not " placing " oneself. It is at first as unreal 
as a dream. The eyes have waked up first and not 
the other senses. Other examples might be given 
from neuroses in which the feeling of unreality is 
one of the striking symptoms. 

§ 11. Hallucinations 

So too the feeling of reality may occur independ- 
ently of all the external avenues of sense or of all 
save one, as for example in hallucination, where we 
think we see or hear a person and there is no one 



40 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

there, or in illusion where there is a real stimulus 
in one sense quality, but hallucinatory contribu- 
tions from the other qualities. 

But the point of the whole discussion is that the 
feeling of reality is one thing and the visual or 
auditory impression is another. The latter comes 
from an external stimulus which is rarely, if ever, 
in real life, isolated from other external stimuli of 
other sense qualities. That is to say that as senti- 
ent beings we function as integrated unities, and 
our sights are never sights alone but are always 
sights plus sounds plus touches, etc., the complete- 
ness of the whole symphony of senses, so to speak, 
being necessary for the strongest feeling of reality. 
And this feeling of reality, which is not sight and 
not sound, nor smell, nor taste, nor cutaneous sen- 
sation, nor motor sense alone, but is a perception 
of all of them together, is an internal sensation, and 
not itself an external one at all. 

A fact also not to be lost sight of is that the 
reality feeling is felt not alone with external per- 
ceptions of the classes mentioned above, sights, 
sounds, etc., but is felt, if to a slighter intensity, 
with memories and ideas of all sorts. And there 
are people of an imaginative nature who have the 
feeling of reality very strongly in connection with 
ideas of visual content, of auditory content, etc. 
For such persons the actual experience of real 
things is frequently confused with ideal experi- 
ences. For some reason which is not germane to 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 41 

our present discussion, their feeling of reality is 
hyperexcitable. How they have become hypersen- 
sitive to the complex feeling of reality does not in- 
terest us here. The fact is that they are thus hyper- 
sensitive. 

§ 12. Reality Feeling and Images 

That the feeling of reality normally occurs to a' 
slight degree in connection with a visual image is 
quite comprehensible if we consider that all the ave- 
nues of sense are traversable in both directions. 
Whether this is a literal fact or not with regard to 
the actual direction of nerve impulses does not 
make any difference. We know that the sight of 
some appalling thing recurs to consciousness with 
an intensity normally great, even if it is less than 
that of the original experience. We know that 
strains of music spontaneously occur to the mind's 
ear from time to time for hours, after listening to 
a concert or opera. And it would not be unreason- 
able to suppose that, even if we were not conscious 
of it, there also spontaneously recurred impressions 
from other senses which were impressed at the same 
time we had the original experience. And the feel- 
ing of reality is one of those sensations originally 
aroused at the time of the incident in question, the 
automobile accident or the concert or what not. So 
it is quite reasonable to suppose that, as we func- 
tioned at the time as an integrated totality, we 
should now function as a whole, though with dimin- 



42 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ished intensity, and that the recurring vision should 
bring with it a slight resuscitation at least of the 
feeling of reality. 

§ 13. The Feelings and the Emotions 

The internal sensations are the most interesting 
of all sensations, including, as they do, the organic 
sensations of nausea, hunger, thirst and sex, and 
the feelings usually called emotions, whose classi- 
fication and description has caused so much dis- 
agreement among psychologists, and whose relation 
to desires, wishes and volitions has been so unsatis- 
factorily investigated to date. 

The internal sensations are particularly interest- 
ing to the student of psychoanalysis, on the one 
hand, and of psychical research problems on the 
other, because of their ordinary indefiniteness, 
coupled with a propensity they have of coming 
severally or in groups suddenly into the light of 
consciousness, and thereby greatly influencing the 
individual's conduct, and especially his beliefs, 
fears, hates, loves, dislikes and his verbal expres- 
sions. 

The internal sensations are doubly interesting, 
too, if we realize that, in the unconscious, a brief 
exposition of which will be given in Chapters IV to 
VI, these sensations are absolutely constant and 
unremitting, as long as life lasts. No general and 
unceasing activity of a large city, some of whose 
inhabitants are always awake and doing their 
work, could come anywhere near being as universal 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 43 

as is the activity in the living human or animal 
body, reports of which are, so to speak, made to 
the brain and nerve centres every instant, whether 
the individual be conscious or unconscious, awake 
or asleep. As long as he lives, his lungs are filled 
and emptied of air and his blood circulates, his 
various vital organs perform their unremitting 
functions, and the cells of his tissues are incessantly 
proliferated with the ceaseless activity of a factory 
which, once opened, never shuts down until it is 
finally dismantled and razed. 

Something will be said later about the uncon- 
scious, which is the power that drives the machines 
in this human productive unit, but here I would 
mention only the fact that of the details of the 
actual motions of the various machines, and of the 
shapes, densities and other qualities of the raw 
material and the different stages it goes through, 
few are probably ever known by the president of the 
company owning the factory, in other words, con- 
sciousness. Only on the rarest of occasions does 
a workman appear in the executive offices, so to 
speak. It is as unusual as is the phenomenon ab- 
normal which is studied by the psychical research- 
ers. But it would be quite illogical for the factory 
hand of an automobile plant to appear and try to 
tell the owner about a soap factory a thousand 
miles away. 

The facts, that appear in the spiritistic seance, 
are psychological facts, but they have no more bear- 
ing on the questions they are declared to have than 



44 MAX'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

would be the claim of an auto mechanic that a soap 
vat would do to paint auto bodies in. 

Expressing this in psychological terms we may 
say that the qualities of consciousness, which term 
I prefer to " spiritistic phenomena/' evoked at the 
seance, are all natural phenomena, and no excep- 
tions to the laws of the unconscious and of con- 
sciousness taken together, but that they are offered 
as proofs of what would require quite a different 
type of fact to prove it. In other words science 
cannot yet accept either the facts, for reasons I will 
later give, or the interpretations of those facts, 
which seem to the psychical researchers as evi- 
dences of disembodied intelligence or survival of 
conscious personality. 

§ 14. Complexity of Consciousness 

In this chapter I wish merely to emphasize the 
very great complexity of the stream of conscious- 
ness. In another chapter I will present the proofs 
of the still greater complexity of the unconscious. 
But as the conscious life itself is so complex, its 
own testimony about matters of scientific truth has 
to be most carefully sifted, and as the unconscious 
is still more complicated and at the same time is 
a very large factor among the determinants of the 
conscious life, it is manifestly absurd to take the 
testimony of either conscious or unconscious men- 
tality as having any weight in an argument de- 
signed to prove the independent existence of spirit 
apart from body, when the nature of the connection 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 45 

between mind and body is so little understood as it 
is today. 

In fact it is much too early to say that any such 
separating and distinguishing a thing as a connec- 
tion between two separate things may be predicated 
of mind and body. It may be that mind is only 
something analogous to a quality of a chemical 
compound, differing from the qualities of any of the 
elements of which it is composed. Mind or spirit 
would then be merely a quality of the compound: 
life and matter, and as dependent on both matter 
and life for its existence as are the qualities of the 
chemical compound dependent upon the two chem- 
ical elements themselves. 

Finally the thesis of this chapter is that those 
who make any statement whatever concerning the 
thing they call spirit "will be obliged not only to 
make a careful definition of what it is, and what re- 
lation it bears to the subjective sensations or mental 
images ; but also to orient themselves exactly as to 
the functions of these mental images in the mental 
life of the individual, before they venture to state 
that anything perceived via the subjective or ob- 
jective sensations can be said to be scientifically 
true or to prove the existence of a force outside the 
body but related to the body — a force that pre- 
serves in its existence outside of the body something 
like a conscious personality. In brief the direct 
experience we have of mind or " spirit " is only in 
connection with the body, and it is a matter of de- 
duction pure and simple to prove (1) its existence 



46 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

apart from the body and (2) its ability to affect 
bodies with which it is not directly connected. 
Some of the difficulties of such proof, not to say its 
impossibility, I shall attempt to show in what 
follows. 

We have no direct experience of our own 
" spirit " demonstrably separated from our own 
body, any more than we have a direct experience of 
any one else's spirit apart from our own body. I 
infer that others have minds like mine, and the 
validity of my inference is dependent on what I per- 
ceive them doing. My perception of the actions 
of others, which are what I should do myself, if I 
were in their place, is my only logical guarantee 
that they exist and have mental and physical equip- 
ment like my own. 

The psychical researcher, however, asks us to be- 
lieve, for he cannot demonstrate, that there are 
beings without bodies, who can act in ways unlike 
our present corporeal mundane ways, that these 
beings were once connected with bodies now disin- 
tegrated and that we ourselves will become such 
beings after our bodies disintegrate. It is one 
thing to be asked to believe this, quite another to be 
given scientific proof of it. I believe it most po- 
tently, but I cannot accept the proof of it that is 
offered. I shall show later how it is inevitable that 
I should believe it, and yet quite as inevitable that 
I should reject the arguments offered to prove it; 
the word belief being, as I think, used in a double 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 47 

sense in ordinary language, but really meaning 
that which would be lief or be liked. 

While my perception of the actions of others is 
my only logical guarantee that others exist, it is a 
completely satisfactory one for it has never been 
known to fail. The logical guarantee offered by 
the spiritist fails at almost every time and place. 
If it did not, our entire social life would be quite 
different from what it is ; for we should all be able 
all the time to commune with absent or deceased 
friends or relatives, to raise and project ourselves 
through space, and to lift almost any weight at 
almost any distance without touching either it or 
anything connected with it, and finally to locate 
all the hidden treasures in the world, and to fore- 
tell with absolute certainty just what was going to 
happen in the future. 

§ 15. Feeling of Reality Detachable 

The feeling of reality is a floating feeling, that 
is, it may become attached to any sensation what- 
ever or failing to be connected with a sensation, it 
may attach itself to an image. While this specific 
internal quality, the feeling of reality, different 
from sight or hearing, usually is felt as an almost 
indistinguishable part of the sight or sound, in the 
deja vue situation it functions without stimulus. 
It is also a feeling that is backed up by the uncon- 
scious wish, which, being the craving for external- 
ity, will seek, in almost any available substitute, 



48 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

externality or the feeling of reality that generally 
reports externality. In other words the uncon- 
scious wish inevitably tends to attach the feelings 
of reality to something. In a spiritistic seance the 
feeling of reality, being in the minds of the sitters 
removed as much as possible from those external 
impressions of sight, sound and touch, with which 
it usually lives, is in a particularly errant and un- 
satisfied state and flies with avidity to anything 
that occurs with sufficient vividness. As has been 
mentioned elsewhere, the conscious mental states 
that, in circumstances which remove light and 
sound completely, are most likely to occur are 
mental images, the representations, whether exact 
replicas or recombinations of their components, of 
experiences that have occurred to the sitters at 
some previous time in their lives. 

In the half sleep catharsis practised by Dr. Lud- 
wig Frank of Zurich these visual or auditory mem- 
ories, together with the emotions that accompanied 
the original experiences, are made the object of 
special scientific study for their bearing on the 
analysis of his patients. In the spiritistic seance 
they are made the arguments to prove the existence 
of discarnate intelligences different from the sitter. 
In Frank's patients the feeling of reality is asso- 
ciated with many of these visions. His patients 
for the moment believe they are again experiencing 
what they did once experience. In the spiritistic 
seance, the images, visions, sounds or touches as the 
case may be, are similarly associated with the feel- 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 49 

ing of reality. But in the doctor's patients the 
reality is a reality that is recognized to apply only 
to the patients' own past. In the seance the real- 
ity felt by the individual sitter is claimed to be a 
reality for all people, not only at the time and 
under the circumstances but in all conditions. Yet 
it is evident that what is felt as real by a single 
person under unusual circumstances is not likely 
to be universally valid for all people in all cir- 
cumstances. 

In short the phenomena of the seance are due to 
the propensity of the unattached feelings of reality 
on the part of the sitters to attach themselves to 
other mental states than objective sensations — 
from external stimuli, in other words, to the sub- 
jective states of the sitters, that is, to their own 
mental images which, under the conditions of the 
seance, are much more likely, than in ordinary life, 
to come from the unconscious, where they are ordi- 
narily kept, and to appear in consciousness. The 
question of the occurrence into one person's mind 
of images that have originated in the mind of some 
other person, telepathy, is a question that will be 
more fully discussed in another place. Here I am 
stating merely that the unconscious wish forces the 
attachment of the feeling of reality to something 
all the time. If it cannot be attached to external 
stimuli, because of their being as far as possible 
eliminated by the conditions of the seance, it will 
spontaneously attach itself to images. 

In a disposition or in a situation where the feel- 



50 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ings of reality are loosely attached to the different 
external sensations, it is sometimes a matter of 
doubt as to whether, in any given experience, they 
will attach themselves to the external sensation or 
to the image. Where, on the contrary, there is a 
strong sense of pleasure associated with an image 
(and a pain, or no pleasure at all, associated with 
an actual external sight) , there is no doubt that the 
reality feeling will tend strongly to attach itself 
to the image, and not to the contradictory or an- 
tagonistic visual sensation. Thus, if the observer 
at a seance saw dimly the medium's foot lifting up 
the table, and at the same time had a strongly pleas- 
urable feeling attached to the sight of an unsup- 
ported table, which he visualized, the feeling of 
reality would naturally attach itself to the image of 
the unsupported table. And in the case of Eusapia 
Palladino's feet (or rather shoes supposed to con- 
tain her feet) which were held by two of the ob- 
servers, the tactual image of the foot-filled shoe, 
being so closely associated with the unconscious 
pleasure of being a partaker in so remarkable an 
incident as a table rising without visible means, 
would of course have the reality feeling attached to 
it, and the shoe holder would testify that he knew 
the woman's foot was in the shoe all the time. 

Thus we see the anticipated pleasure preparing 
to attach a semi-floating feeling of reality to an 
image already formed in the observer's mind, in- 
evitably attaching it thereto by virtue of the 
psyche's irresistible leaning toward pleasure and 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 51 

away from pain. The deception is not consciously 
made by the observer, but is made unconsciously 
for him by the steady drift of the unconscious itself. 
This is the very essence of belief — be-lief -ing or be- 
pleasing an actual sight or sound into an image by 
driving from the actuality the feeling of reality 
and attaching it to the image, which, impelled up- 
ward from the unconscious by the same trend 
toward pleasure and away from pain, is waiting 
ready to receive it. 

Belief is therefore the attachment of the reality 
feeling to an image sent up from the unconscious 
depths of the psyche. A verbally expressed belief 
is merely the wording of the same mental process. 
Knowledge is the awareness of the law according to 
which things take place; and is as entirely inde- 
pendent of belief as it is completely liberated both 
from the image and from the feeling of reality. 
Both of these are intimately connected with bodily 
processes, while knowledge of the relations of 
things outside of the body is necessarily cut off 
from all participation in matters of images or feel- 
ings. 

The conditions and the very atmosphere of the 
spiritistic seance are such as to cause the feeling 
to be a floating feeling adrift in the strong current 
of the unconscious. Those who attend the seance 
with the fully conscious purpose of becoming the 
more convinced are no more adrift on the uncon- 
scious current than those who come with ridicule 
or scepticism. The same unconscious wish for 



52 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

magnification of the ego controls what is believed by 
the latter as mnch as what is believed by the for- 
mer. So that where there is a strong conscious 
wish to believe the opposite, and an equally strong, 
if not stronger, wish to believe in spirits, there will 
be a bitter conflict in the psyche of the individual. 

Only the person who has clearly grasped the 
reality principle will be free from the vacillations 
of the reality feeling. Such a person alone in his 
thinking has freed himself from his conscious and 
unconscious desires. In this sense science is as 
truly emancipated from desire either for one thing 
or for its opposite as is the Hindu who has attained 
Nirvana. The scientist alone can see facts, be- 
cause he alone is uninfluenced by the ideal of what 
he thinks facts ought to be or to show. To become 
a true scientist one has to learn to care not a whit 
whether a thing is one way or the other, but only to 
care to find out which way it is. 

This does not mean that I am attempting to 
place any comparative value upon either fact or 
fancy. One of them may be as valuable for human 
life as the other, in different spheres of human ac- 
tivity. But it does mean that I wish to keep them 
apart and to emphasize the necessity of not calling 
a fancy a fact. 

The only point in which science can be said to 
take an interest in the unconscious wish is the point 
of its causal effect upon the actual life of man or the 
universe. The question is : Does belief affect real- 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 53 

it j, or only the reality feeling? Can a man in- 
crease his stature by talcing thought? 

The important contribution made by psycho- 
analysis to this very problem is the fact that, how- 
ever it happens, certain types of diseases are cured 
by psychoanalysis. We know they are cured by 
this agency; we know that physical factors are 
changed by the patient's mental view of his sur- 
roundings being changed by thoughts that come to 
him during his visit to the psychoanalytic phy- 
sician. While we know the fact from correlation 
of repeated observation, we do not know exactly 
how the cure is brought about. 1 But the discov- 
ery that the unconscious wish has something to do 
with the cure puts the unconscious wish imme- 
diately into the category of objects to be studied 
scientifically, and it is now being studied by many 
people in different parts of the world. For exam- 
ple Ferenczi 2 regards the stigmata and other hys- 
terical conversion phenomena as the only true ma- 
terializations, in which the unconscious wish that 
is unable to enter consciousness is not satisfied with 
sensory excitation of the apparatus of perception 
but transfers itself directly to physiological func- 
tions themselves. 

I have noted that the feeling of reality has de- 
grees from that of the greatest reality, in the great- 
est activity, to that of the least reality in the body's 

1 See Frink : Morbid Fears and Compulsions, page 547. 

2 Hysterie und Pathoneurosen, 1919, p. 24. 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 



state of least activity. I have also noted that the 
most intense feeling of reality is formed of the 
concurrence of the separate feelings of reality asso- 
ciated with the different senses, sight, sound, touch, 
taste, etc. Therefore we might suppose that a per- 
son whose senses were shut off or were anesthetized 
one after another would feel less and less reality. 
The sounds that come to the ear sound real enough 
when the eyes are closed, but the total feeling of 
reality is less, and if after closing the eyes we stop 
up the ears too, the feeling of reality is still less 
intense. Take away after that touch and smell 
and taste, and life would have little feeling of 
reality left associated with external impressions, 
and would attach itself to internal impression and 
to ideas and images. 

Images, whether conscious or unconscious, are 
the concrete and specific form which the uncon- 
scious wish takes in its rise upward from the 
fundamental craving for life, love and activity, and 
the methods of its selection of what specific images 
to offer up to consciousness (whether they reach 
consciousness or not being another matter of their 
availability and ability to pass the censor 1 ) are 
the principles of symbolism and are governed by 
another feeling, the feeling of similarity. 

So if the unconscious selects for presentation to 
consciousness particular images according to the 
principles of symbolism, based on the feeling of 
sameness, it is quite likely, if not inevitable, that 

i See Wilfrid Lay: Man's Unconscious Conflict, page 71. - 



THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 55 

the images will be those most apposite to the dozen 
or so of primary symbols mentioned by Ernest 
Jones, 1 symbols that are common to all men and 
women. Therefore, the images presented to a 
group of people assembled for a common purpose 
are likely to have a high degree of symbolic affinity. 
They will all be likely to be those associated with 
the concept of death. So that in the cross corre- 
spondences noted by Frank Podmore in his book, 
The Newer Spiritualism (New York 1911, page 
240), it is not surprising to find the automatists 
in various parts of the world thinking of death in 
various symbolic images. And his conclusion 
"forced upon us by an impartial study of the re- 
port " that " the coincidences cannot be explained 
by mere chance association of ideas " is super- 
ficially true but only so. The association is not a 
chance one but is determined in each case by the 
unconscious wish of the automatist, and their un- 
conscious wishes are exactly the same as those of 
every one else in the world. The unconscious can- 
not wish for death, and, in sending up its death 
symbols, presents them in negative form, the net 
result being only the ever present wish for life. 

i Psychoanalysis, page 144. 



CHAPTER II 

EMOTIONS 

I trust I have at least partially succeeded in 
showing the high degree of complexity of even the 
stream of consciousness, when we look at it in its 
entirety from the beginning of the day to the end 
of it. We are not only seeing, hearing, smelling 
and tasting from time to time each day, but are re- 
ceiving conscious impressions of entirely different 
sense quality in the shape of heat, cold, active 
movement, translation through space, articular 
and tendinous sensations, muscular sensations, and 
pressure on different parts of our skin, in the shape 
of hunger, thirst, sex, dizziness, nausea, pain, pleas- 
ure, the feeling of sameness, the feeling of reality, 
the feeling of will and, what I have not yet men- 
tioned, the emotions. 

If the conscious life were not complex enough 
already, it would become so by the addition of the 
emotions, which I define as sensations of internal 
conditions within the body, differing in quality 
from the other internal sensations just mentioned. 
Their importance in the discussion of spiritistic 
problems is not so much the fact that any adverse 
or unpleasant emotions are said to be unfavourable 
for the proper conduct of a spiritistic seance. The 
observer who comes with contempt or aversion in 

56 



EMOTIONS 57 

his heart is not welcomed by the circle, and is con- 
sidered to have a deleterious effect. 

§ 1. Emotions Contribute Energy 

The importance of the emotions for our consid- 
eration of these problems presented by spiritism 
comes from the fact that the emotions contribute 
not only a large amount of energy to actions, mak- 
ing them much stronger and efficient, but also an 
amount of weight hardly to be underestimated, to 
the statements made about anything and particu- 
larly about spirit. In short we believe what we 
like and say what we believe. 

This is the advantage possessed by the truly re- 
ligious disposition over the doubting one, that it 
makes the possessor of it cheerful, happy and con- 
tented, both those who are, to use William James' 
expression, " once born " x and those " twice born," 
who have wrestled with their doubts and have 
gained from the struggle the necessary relaxation 
of dubitant tension. But, if we fully grasp the im- 
plications of modern analytical psychology, we see 
that the antagonism between science and religion 
has appeared in a new field. Formerly the doc- 
trines of evolution were thought to be at variance 
with the inspired story of creation in six days. 
Now the nature of the soul is being examined by 
science in such a way as to show that science can- 
not prove even the existence of the kind of soul 
religion claims for mankind. 

i Varieties of Religious Experience. 



58 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

It is a very simple and " once born " experience 
to feel certain of the soul as a personal conscious- 
ness transcending the corporeal and surviving 
death; but it is quite another experience to begin 
to doubt the evidence of the feelings and seek for 
proof among the relations of external phenomena. 
Whence comes the doubt? It is not merely from 
verbal objections to belief that the truly religious 
disposition may hear casually, and that fill his mind 
with alarm. The doubt is a physiological mal- 
adjustment that has become conscious as an idea of 
visual, auditory or other external sense quality, a 
maladjustment that turns into despair in melan- 
cholic mental disorders, where it has reached or is 
reaching its limit, beyond which it breaks up the 
body. Like any other form of religion, spiritism 
is more an emotional matter than a purely intel- 
lectual one and the dominant emotion in it all is 
fear. 

When we realize that the impressions made upon 
the mind from the body, through nerves that ter- 
minate in sense organs situated in all parts of the 
body, are appearing to consciousness from time to 
time all day long and every day, it is evident what 
a difficult matter it is to classify and describe the 
emotions, and how natural it has been for man- 
kind to associate them with, and practically to 
name them after, external things, perceived through 
other senses. 

It is the great number of these internal sensa- 
tions and the fact that they are felt in groups of 



EMOTIONS 59 

ever changing combinations of elements that has 
made us automatically integrate them by associat- 
ing them with now one, now another, of the ex- 
ternal sensations, sight, hearing, and the others. 

§ 2. Emotions Indefinite 

Consequently a definiteness is attained (essen- 
tial to the emotions being constantly perceived by 
consciousness) by the very fact of similar groups 
of internal sensations being associated with spe- 
cial ideas (sights, sounds, etc.). It is easily com- 
prehensible that there are very few innate associa- 
tions of emotions with external sensations, for in 
infancy the impressions received from the various 
internal organs are quite as numerous as they are 
in adulthood, yet they are associated with few ideas 
or few external perceptions, because of the fact both 
that there are few ideas with which to associate 
them, and that the actual external impressions 
themselves only later acquire significance, i. e., asso- 
ciative connection with the internal sensations of 
fear, aversion, etc. Thus Watson has shown 
clearly enough by his experiments on infants that 
they have practically no innate fear of animals, the 
fear being later acquired through experience. 

The consciousness of the position of the body is 
one of the internal sensations, and is very early 
associated with pleasurable or unpleasurable emo- 
tions. The maintenance of the body in one posi- 
tion is secured through the constant operation of 
impulses from the nerve centres, which are exceed- 



60 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

ingly frequent; and this holding of the body rigid 
soon becomes very irksome. Therefore pleasant or 
unpleasant emotions come into consciousness, 
though faintly, from time to time, all day long, 
due to our sitting or standing in certain positions. 
And conversely the posture of the body is well 
known to have an influence on the general emo- 
tional tone. As James said x : " Smooth the brow, 
brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than 
the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a 
major key, pass the genial compliment, and your 
heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually 
thaw ! " 

§ 3. Emotions and Unity of Function 

The sensory nature of emotion must be clearly 
grasped before one can see its effect on action. An 
emotion, being an organic sensation, and closely 
connected causally with the vegetative (autonomic) 
processes of the body, it is obvious that only those 
emotions are advantageous to the health of the 
body which are conducive to the complete func- 
tioning of the body as a totality, an organism all 
of whose parts are necessary to the integrity of the 
whole, and the functioning of any one of which will 
by deficiency or surplus proficiency, alter the total 
productivity of the whole. 

If this unitary conception of the organism is 
true, then there will be no total situation environ- 

i Psychology, Vol. II, page 463. 



EMOTIONS 61 

ing the individual that does not influence all of him 
at the same time. There will be situations in 
which he is subject to the maximum degree of dis- 
traction in which part of him will want to go one 
way and the other part in the opposite direction, 
such as a man standing on the window sill of the 
tenth story of a building wi(h the room on fire 
behind him. The height invites him in, the fire 
out. A girl is in the same situation when a man 
importunes her, whom she loves or by whom she is 
infatuated. In this situation she is torn between 
the lure of the fire within and the fall without. 

Thus situations have really objective qualitative 
differences, being of a diametrically opposing char- 
acter, such as the two I have mentioned, and all 
the way around through a hundred and eighty de- 
grees of arc to a situation in which all the sub- 
jective and objective elements together pull the in- 
dividual in one direction and there is nothing in 
the physical or psychical situation that produces 
any conflict, or puts any brake on the utter abandon 
of the action. 

As an example of this I would offer the skilful 
dive of a good swimmer into a swimming hole in 
the country. The coolness of the water allures, as 
the heat of the skin invites, the swimmer, the cre- 
scendo run up to the ecstatic acme of the plunge, 
during the passage through the air, the muscles 
of the whole body being in a rigorous tension, 
which, in the loop under the water, gradually di- 



62 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

minishes until it reaches the complete relaxation of 
the floating position and the quietly resumed res- 
piration. 

§ 4. The Objective Situation 

This objective situation may be said to contain 
every element of attraction for the ordinary young 
male human; any conflicting element in it belong- 
ing necessarily to the state of mind or body of the 
particular individual. In spite of pool, shady spot 
and sunlight filtering through the forest trees, in 
spite of heat of body, and warmth of air, and the 
hunger of the body for external liquid refresh- 
ment, there may be an idea or an inability or a fear 
on the part of some youth that will make him un- 
able to dive, to enter the water at all, or to enjoy 
his swim, even after he has stepped or dived in. If 
it be not an actual disability, such a deterrent fear 
or inability belongs entirely to the internal or 
psychical situation. The total situation in any 
human activity is never exclusively external, nor is 
it even in sleep or dreams exclusively internal, but 
the activities of the swimming pool nature approach 
externality as a limit, and dreaming approaches 
internalized attention as a limit. 

We may question whether or not the tendency 
is greater of internal conflicts to assert themselves 
over external ones, that is, external situations that 
are intrinsically conflicting. Thus there are peo- 
ple whose external situation as such causes them 
internal conflicts, while other people in the same 



EMOTIONS 63 

external situation develop no conflict at all. A 
given amount of wealth, if possessed by those who 
have been wealthier, will cause worry, while the 
same number of dollars for those who have had less, 
will be the cause of profound satisfaction. Yet 
there are, or appear to be, natures that will de- 
velop a conflict out of any situation whatever. No 
matter how well supplied they are with the world's 
goods or with physical strength or with social re- 
lationships, they will be everlastingly unhappy. 

§ 5. The Conflict 

The activities of the psychical researchers, when 
regarded as merely the natural actions of a group 
of people in whom rages the conflict between the 
idea of life and the idea of death, become much 
easier to understand. They are people in whom the 
concept of the permanent termination of the con- 
scious personality associated with the integrity of 
their physical organism is unconsciously regarded 
with such horror that they take any steps possible 
to prove that this coming to an end on the part of 
consciousness is not really true. 

Such people have not, of course, thought much 
about mind existing apart from consciousness, and 
in the second part of this volume I shall have some- 
thing to say about that possibility and its bearing 
on the question of immortality. The spiritists, on 
the other hand, emphasize the misfortune of losing 
consciousness, although we normally lose it daily 
in sleep, and many times during the day it is 



64 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

broken and interrupted and changed in such a way 
and to such a degree that, regarded as an entity 
in itself, it cannot be said to have a very important 
existence. If I had to choose between " scrap- 
ping " my conscious mental activities and my un- 
conscious ones, I should certainly throw over the 
former, as being the least advantageous for my 
welfare. 

Mind existing apart from consciousness, exist- 
ing in a way inscrutable to consciousness, is the 
only way in which we can conceive of mind as being 
permanent. As the unconscious is the vital urge 
and the vital urge is most continuously manifested 
in the germ plasm, it may eventually turn out that 
the only immortality of the soul that can be proved 
by science is that of the continuity, through in- 
dividual after individual, of the germ plasm it- 
self. And when we reflect that modern genetic 
biology has demonstrated the existence of so great 
a complexity in the chromosomes of the sexual 
cells of animals and man, and reflect that they are 
the continuous life and that everything else about 
the body comes to life and dies, we may not be 
surprised if some day the " soul " is located in the 
germ plasm, in the genes of the chromosomes, in- 
stead of the pineal gland or other places. 

The fact that there is a conflict in the emotions 
existing in so many people shows that there is 
room for what we shall have to call mere chance 
happening in the association of any internal sen- 
sation or emotion with any external sensation 



EMOTIONS 65 

caused by a real stimulus. If it were uot so, the 
design then otherwise manifested would not be 
carried out, — the design of having each individual 
completely unified for operation without the rack- 
ing strains and counter-strains caused by the pleas- 
ant and unpleasant emotions getting attached to 
things that necessarily have to happen together, 
with the unfortunate result that we are frequently 
pleased and pained by the same actual experience. 

§ 6. Fear 

As a result of what is apparently purely fortui- 
tous happening, therefore, certain external impres- 
sions gradually, beginning in infancy, become asso- 
ciated with the sensations constantly entering con- 
sciousness from the interior of the body. What 
gives these internal sensations their pleasurable or 
unpleasant qualities is obviously the general well 
being and proper functioning of the organism it- 
self, or the opposite. 

It is easy to see, then, that fear, which is an in- 
ternal sensation of a group of phenomena taking 
place in the various organs of one's own body, is 
hardly describable or to be grasped in terms of it- 
self, but is readily associated with anything that 
happens to be seen, heard, touched, smelt or tasted 
at that particular time. It has taken centuries to 
turn men's attention from the thing " causing " the 
emotion to the emotion itself. The resistance to 
this direction of the gaze has been almost insuper- 
able. Humanity has insisted that the badness of 



66 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

its feelings was caused by the badness of things out- 
side of the body, and that good feelings were caused 
by good things, although things external could not 
be called either good or bad in themselves, but 
only as evoking, in the individual, feelings that he 
called good or bad. In a later chapter I shall have 
something to say about the unconscious mechanism 
that really causes some of these illogical tendencies 
to attribute internal qualities to external things, 
namely projection and introjection. (See Chap. V, 
sec. 6 and 7.) 

The feeling of sameness or the feeling of similar- 
ity will spread this associated connection, between 
fear, for instance, and either external sensations or 
reproductions of these in the shape of mental im- 
ages; with the result that, even if the original ex- 
perience associated with fear never comes again, 
any similar experience will tend to become asso- 
ciated with the internal sensations constituting the 
fear. 

It thus happens that an association is made be- 
tween fear and death, and also that anything that 
is like death or in any manner suggests death will 
arouse the same fear. There are then associated 
together in the individual's mind a number of ex- 
periences, actions, words, ideas or other states of 
consciousness, any one of which, by virtue of its 
similarity with the idea of death, will arouse the 
same unpleasant emotion. 

This group of ideas, experiences, etc., which is 



EMOTIONS 67 

thus associated together by its tendency always to 
stir up the emotion of fear is called a complex. 
It is quite evident, too, that there are complexes 
integrated by other emotions than fear. But we 
are now in a position to state that the spiritist is 
one whose emotions are largely enlisted on the sub- 
ject of death. He has, so to speak, a death com- 
plex. 

A corollary of this is that the pleasant emotions 
will be enlisted on the side of life, and every ex- 
perience that through the feeling of similarity can 
be associated with the concept of life will be 
grouped together in the same individual's mind. 
Thus there will be two groups of ideas or experi- 
ences in his mind, each of which will be antagonis- 
tic to the other. Large amounts of unpleasant 
emotion will be accumulated on the side of death, 
and similarly large amounts of pleasant emotions 
on the side of life. That is to say, life, and by that 
I mean the continuance of conscious personality, 
will come more and more to be regarded as the 
greatest desideratum and death quite the opposite. 
Therefore such a person will consciously collect 
all possible evidence for the continuance of life and 
for the non-existence or the explaining away of 
death. 

And if it is adequately realized what an impetus 
is given to all human activity by human emotions, 
it will be quite evident that no stone will be left 
unturned both to prove the existence of the con- 



68 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

scious personality after the mortal coil has been 
shuffled off, and to minimize the significance of 
death itself. 

I might add that in other individuals not inter- 
ested in spiritism the fear of some other thing than 
death will be found to have paired off with its 
antagonist and to have enlisted all the unpleasant 
emotions on the one side and the pleasant ones on 
the other. Only with these people it did not hap- 
pen to be death. 

I have taken fear as an illustration only. The 
most refined or subjective emotions are other groups 
of internal sensations that, in the particular in- 
dividual, have become gradually associated with 
more and more abstract ideas, such as the rela- 
tions between forms and masses and colours seen, 
between tones and intensities of sounds heard, and 
between flavours smelt and consistencies and tastes 
of substances put into the mouth as food. The pos- 
sibility of combinations of relations between in- 
ternal and external is endless. 

It is enough in this chapter if I have indicated 
the enormous complexity of even the conscious 
mental content, both in specific instances and in 
variety of specifically different qualities of con- 
sciousness. I feel that I shall not, however, have 
begun to represent the wealth of possibilities, with- 
out offering the reader what is contributed to this 
subject by the unconscious. 

If the emotions are, as has, I trust, been suf- 
ficiently shown in this chapter, sensations of in- 



EMOTIONS 69 

ternal origin within the body, and if we constantly 
have the body with us, so to speak, it will be quite 
necessary to suppose that there are many states and 
conditions within the body that never or rarely 
enter consciousness. It will be evident then that 
the only reasonable name to give them is uncon- 
scious emotions. We are having unconscious emo- 
tions all the time, then, whether we are asleep or 
awake. Indeed it has recently been shown that the 
quality of our sleep is impaired or, for hours at a 
time, we do not sleep at all, not merely because of 
conscious emotions preventing sleep, but because of 
unconscious emotions making it impossible or un- 
refreshing. 

So too we have unconscious sensations not only 
from internal stimuli but from external ones and 
we have unconscious images. The whole world of 
the unconscious mental life in the mind of each and 
every one of us must be our next topic, previous to 
which, however, I shall have to give a brief account 
of how it has been lately studied by means of 
psychoanalysis. 



PART II 
THE UNCONSCIOUS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 



CHAPTER III 

PSYCHOANALYSIS 

Psychoanalysis is the name given by Freud to 
the method of investigating those mental phenom- 
ena which do not find explanation by the ordinary 
methods used in learning about conscious mental 
states. It serves also as a means for bringing about 
cures of certain mental and physical illnesses which 
are known to be of psychic origin. Its chief inter- 
est, however, is not for the invalids that are re- 
stored to health through its elaborate technique, 
for they are necessarily few in number, because the 
physicians competent to use it are an almost neg- 
ligible quantity. 

Its interest for the majority of people of the edu- 
cated classes comes from a very different source, 
namely the extraordinarily clear explanation it 
gives of almost all the inconsistencies and insoluble 
problems of any aspect of human nature which ex- 
cludes the main tenet of psychoanalysis, namely the 
dynamic aspect of the unconscious mental activity. 
It is therefore the firm conviction of the present 
writer and of all real- students of psychoanalysis, 
that less than half the actual facts are taken into 
consideration by those who ignore or misconstrue 

what the scientific study of the unconscious has to 

73 



74 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

say about any phenomena which may in any sense 
be called mental or psychic. 

§ 1. Ignorance about Psychoanalysis 

Almost all people interested in spiritistic phe- 
nomena are ignorant of the newer psychology and 
few of those who know of it have failed to miscon- 
strue it. It is therefore the object of the present 
volume to present as clearly as possible the compli- 
cated subject of the application of psychoanalytic 
facts to the claims made by the spiritists, and to 
indicate, for the help of those who instinctively feel 
that spiritism is a misinterpretation of facts, how 
the factors revealed by a knowledge of the uncon- 
scious bear upon the asseverations of the adherents 
of spiritism, and what regions of the normal human 
mind the spiritists have entered, without knowing 
it, and brought back from subliminal depths mate- 
rial that is not in any way extraordinary, nor valu- 
able as a logical proof of the tacit assumptions of 
spiritism. A suggestion will be offered as to what 
would be a necessary procedure, if the facts of spir- 
itism were to be fully accepted as scientifically 
proven facts, and this suggestion will make it evi- 
dent how far we are from scientifically confirming 
what is stated in numerous books and by promi- 
nent people, whose words have great persuasive 
force, even people who have made their mark in 
strictly scientific work. 

To the contention, therefore, of the many writers 
who have supported the statements of spiritism we 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 75 

shall have to say : Is there not another explanation 
of these phenomena — an explanation that you have 
either never heard of, or have heard of only inade- 
quately, or have perhaps misunderstood? If you 
had the other explanation offered, would you not be 
obliged to consider it, as it is now fully accepted 
by science, and to change some of your views about 
what you have seen or heard, or think you have seen 
or heard? 

As Maeterlinck puts it in The Unknown Guest: 
" For the present it (the spiritistic theory) simply 
relegates to posthumous regions phenomena that 
appear to occur within ourselves; it adds super- 
fluous mystery and needless difficulty to the me- 
diumistic mystery whence it springs" (page 55), 
and " Before turning toward the mystery beyond 
the grave let us first exhaust the possibilities of 
the mystery here on earth " (page 57). 

§ 2. Spiritis?n and Love 

I am quite aware that the psychoanalyst who 
would thus address a spiritist is in the position of 
an adult trying to reason with a youth and show 
him the impossible things he says and feels about a 
girl for whom he has developed a sudden infatu- 
ation, but who is intellectually his inferior and tem- 
peramentally actually antipathetic. Fired by his 
phantasies, born of his unconscious wishes, he can- 
not in most cases see the same things his adviser 
sees and practically is unable to hear the argu- 
ments presented. 

For I shall try to show that the tendency to be- 



76 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

lieve in spirits is as universal and as strong as the 
tendency of youth to fall in love, but that neither 
one of them is any more rational than the other; 
that the original impulse to attempt scientifically 
to prove the existence of disembodied intelligences 
is based on quite as deep lying unconscious trends 
as is the perfectly normal exaggeration on the 
lover's part concerning the supernal qualities of his 
mistress ; furthermore that a scientific proof, if such 
is required, is as far from a person in such a state 
of mind as prudence and moderation of thought and 
action are to the impetuous lover. Indeed the 
human race has always been in love with the idea 
of spirit, and I shall try to show just how this idea 
first originated, and out of what mechanisms of un- 
conscious thinking. 

As these mechanisms have been discovered by 
psychoanalysis it is therefore essential that any 
one who wishes to be in a position to make an au- 
thoritative statement about the spirit apart from 
the body should first know all that has been re- 
cently discovered about the mind in the body — a 
large interrelation of facts having a high degree of 
complexity that must be my excuse for any failure 
in one volume adequately to represent enough of it 
to orient the reader in the maze of statements daily 
made concerning the " spirit." 

§ 3. What Psychoanalysis Is Not 

I shall try in the next three chapters to present a 
brief positive outline of psychoanalytic theory, a 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 77 

theory against which no valid objection has yet 
been made and for which everything so far sci- 
entifically observed has shown the strongest pos- 
sible logical proof. Here, as a preliminary, I feel 
it necessary to present some negative considera- 
tions. Psychoanalysis, although it originated in 
the physician's consulting room, and is as yet, as a 
cure for mental and physical ills of psychic origin, 
properly restricted to that precinct, is not any 
longer merely a medical affair. Those who have 
clearly seen the implications of Freud's therapeutic 
measures have realized that the acceptance of the 
theory of the unconscious, as a dynamic hypothesis 
for explaining the sequence of ideas, emotions and 
volitions in patients mentally disordered, carries 
along with it the acceptance of still more inclusive 
laws according to which occur the conscious mental 
states of the absolutely normal person. Psycho- 
analysis is therefore not merely a method of restor- 
ing order to a mind diseased. 

Nor is it a justification, as has not infrequently 
been illogically inferred, for the indiscriminate or 
even strictly and narrowly illegal gratification of 
the sexual passions. Freud's deduction that neu- 
roses were the perversion of the sexual instinct 
might lead some who had firmly repressed it against 
their will to infer that he recommended their rais- 
ing the " lid," so to speak, and attaining physical 
health through sexual license. But no psycho- 
analyst of repute makes that inference, even though 
he may know, as every one else does, that true 



78 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

wliolesomeness of society exists only upon the basis 
of a union of man and woman with complete fusion 
of their interests in the lives of their children. 

But, more than all that, and more germane to 
the subject of spiritism, is the consideration that 
psychoanalysis has established the unconscious as 
a foundation of conscious life, and that no conscious 
phenomenon is adequately explained without ref- 
erence to the unconscious life behind it, any more 
than a tree is only that part of it which is above 
ground. The leaves cannot be explained without 
the knowledge that there are roots, and conscious 
thinking, feeling and willing cannot be understood 
without regard to the unconscious forces that moti- 
vate them. 

Therefore we must repeat and most emphatically 
insist that it is illogical and otiose to make any 
statement about " spirit w as a thing apart from 
matter until the relations of spirit and matter are 
more thoroughly understood, as they exist in com- 
bination with each other in the living animal, hu- 
man or sub-human. And it is more and more evi- 
dent that the majority of those interested in psy- 
chical research have not, in their consideration of 
disembodied spirit, made a sufficient study of em- 
bodied spirit. It may eventually appear that the 
embodied variety is the only one existent anywhere. 

§ 4. Repression 

In studying the phenomena of hysteria the psy- 
choanalysts were forced to the conclusion that at 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 79 

least part of them were caused by the action of 
memories of past events or experiences that had 
been resolutely thrust back by the patient into a 
part of his mind whence they were never recalled. 
To this thrusting back they gave the name repres- 
sion and inferred that the cause of it was the un- 
pleasant or fearful nature of the experiences around 
which the never-recalled, and therefore permanently 
unconscious, memories clustered. This was the 
psychic trauma (wound) theory, and the cause for 
many nervous troubles was sought in the wound to 
the spirit (psyche), which, as were found in some 
cases, had been received in early youth. The re- 
pressed ideas and emotions of the medium are let 
out in the only way possible for some neurotics, 
from the unconscious into conscious life, and still 
displaced. They are displaced not upon some con- 
scious compensatory idea, as in the neurosis, but 
upon an idea which comes into consciousness in the 
trance or in the automatism of whatever nature it 
may be. 

In every soul struggle is found the drive of the 
unconscious toward external expression, not neces- 
sarily the drive of the unconscious to attain con- 
sciousness nor the craving of the activities below 
the level of consciousness to enter the upper spheres 
of consciousness. We may not in every case sup- 
pose that the craving of the unconscious is simply 
to appear before consciousness as if the latter were 
a king, the very atmosphere surrounding whom was 
a source of pleasure, honour and material advantage. 



80 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

It is much more likely that our vital force which is 
fragmentarily expressed iu consciousness is quite 
as satisfactorily, as far as the unconscious wish is 
concerned, expressed in movements in and of the 
body, of which we are not aware, by proliferation 
of cells, by chemical action, by physiological proc- 
ess and automatic actions of all varieties, quite as 
well as by the comparatively few tensions and re- 
laxations of which we are now and then conscious. 

The vital force, by whatever name we call it, is 
only partly striving to vitalize inanimate matter, 
and its onward, progressive, pushing nature is only 
partly concerned with transmitting life and is also 
indifferent to the means by which the inward drive 
is externalized. So that it is quite as well satisfied, 
by knocking over an ash barrel in the street as by 
emitting an ovum. Externality is its goal, and it 
achieves externality quite as much by actions that 
from a narrower point of view we call destructive 
as those we call constructive or creative. 

The attainment of consciousness in the sense of 
the unconscious wish of one person, entering an- 
other's consciousness is secured by the medium's 
unconscious, if he goes into a trance and speaks 
or writes what he does not himself become con- 
scious of directly, and other people hear him ( or see 
him) express through automatic speaking or writ- 
ing, but what he later becomes conscious of through 
seeing his writing or hearing other people tell him 
his own words. His unconscious wish has tra- 
versed one of the paths toward externality and has 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 81 

arrived, as indicated in the preceding paragraph. 
There are many other paths. The medium's vital 
force has secured externality indirectly, as far as 
the medium's own consciousness is concerned, but 
just as directly, from the point of view of the un- 
conscious, as if it had succeeded in presenting the 
ideas to the medium's conscious mind without 
going a round-about way to be told by some one 
else. 

But whether the advancing vital urge appears to 
one consciousness (the medium's) or to another 
(the observer's), is of little moment so long as it 
produces its external effect — the only effect that 
could satisfy the desire for externality. 

Psychoanalysis sees the dire results to the psyche 
that come from the failure to externalize, and its 
method is that of a liberator, and its technique 
consists solely in removing the resistances to ex- 
pression that are imposed by conventional society 
so that the externalization of the vital urge may be 
whole instead of fragmentary, unitary instead of 
divergent, and socially symbolic instead of aso- 
cially, where it has to be symbolic. 

Whatever the vital urge, libido (horme), elan 
vital ) may be, it is transformed into material real- 
ity or it is material reality in motion or it is energy 
latent or free. Its most highly organized expres- 
sion as we know it here is life, and to declare that 
it, or anything so analogous to it is a spirit, moves 
chairs and tables and plays mandolins, is to say 
that something that had not life before is suddenly 



82 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

and unaccountably presented with life for a very 
brief time and then deprived of it in a most capri- 
cious manner. If this were an instance of a vital 
urge that was yearning for externality we could 
imagine an easier method by which to attain it. 
But psychoanalysis regards the craving for life 
and love as something affecting only human and 
animal life, and is concerned solely with the ex- 
pression of that craving in human thought and 
action. So its aim is direct expression and the 
indirect way of the medium is not sought. The 
particular method for smoothing the path of the 
impulses that ever strive to come from the un- 
conscious into the world of externality, is the 
removing of the resistance which is caused by 
fear of the environment or of certain elements 
of it. As soon as this fear is removed the only 
obstacle to full expression is cleared away. The 
unconscious impulses can then find all the ex- 
ternal objects necessary to absorb it all. In 
an absolutely unrepressing environment every 
primal instinct would be immediately followed and 
what we call society would be an impossibility. In 
an environment as repressive as most civilized com- 
munities the natural instincts are held in check, 
and are gratified not directly but indirectly by the 
symbolic actions which liberate the same amount 
of energy but with results more conformable to con- 
vention. The medium's method of giving external- 
ity to his unconscious wishes is consequently only 
one of the many indirect methods, and has not more 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 83 

bearing upon the existence of " spirit " outside of 
his body than the blood in his veins has connection 
with the water in the " canals " of Mars. 

But repression shuts in the vital urge, and this 
implies that repression prevents the entrance, into 
consciousness, of many images, of most all, in fact, 
of the images that represent the infinity of impres- 
sions received by the medium for the entire dura- 
tion of his corporate existence as a receptive and in- 
tegrating organism. If the repression were com- 
pletely removed every past experience could be re- 
called by the appropriate situation. The appropri- 
ate situation is such a combination of events as to 
call for the revivification of the given memory. 
The medium's surroundings in a trance, and the 
automatic writer's quiet and. repose, are both ap- 
propriate situations for the removal of repression 
from certain sections of past memories, because 
both shift the responsibility for what is said, done 
and written from the medium and automatist to 
some other " personality," either- the medium's 
" control " or the dictating " spirit." 

Psychoanalytic therapy consists in removing, as 
far as- possible, the resistances caused by the fear 
of the patient to express his unconscious wishes, 
and the synthesis is then accomplished by causing 
the patient himself to see the means whereby the 
unconscious craving may receive its complete grati- 
fication in literal forms, where these do not violate 
the requirements of convention, or, where they do, 
the synthesis aims to cause him to secure quite as 



84 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

adequate satisfactions in symbolic form, thus giv- 
ing him an ability to make to any environment 
adaptations whose failure has been the true cause 
of his illness. 

For us the significant fact about psychoanalytic 
therapeutic methods is that so many early memories 
forgotten for many years were brought into con- 
sciousness, that quite evidently no experience what- 
ever is lost by the mind in spite of apparent forget- 
fulness. In other words, no matter what has been 
the history of the individual, he retains in his 
memory, though he may not be able to recall to con- 
sciousness, practically everything that he has ever 
experienced, whether it be a sensation caused by 
an external stimulus, or an image, or idea, that has 
evolved in his mind years before as a recombina- 
tion of other sense elements. 

It is also a significant fact that the conditions 
in the present time under which these memories are 
finally recalled, after they have lain dormant for 
many years, are quite similar to the conditions 
of the spiritistic seance, namely quiet and subdued 
light. And in the earlier psychoanalytic technique 
they used hypnosis, which developed the various 
secondary personalities, showing that the memories 
repressed had tended to become integrated systems, 
that had many of the characteristics of individual 
personalities. Similarly the unconscious memories 
of the medium show a tendency to do the .same 
thing, and an association has been found in the 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 85 

minds of the psychical researchers between the sec- 
ondary personality and the abnormal. 

But the secondary personality, at least from one 
point of view, is not anything abnormal at all. To 
a certain extent even the most ordinary so-called 
normal human, may be said to exhibit a dual per- 
sonality in his commonplace forgetfulness. An 
idea may be presented to a very opinionated man, 
and he may unconditionally reject it as impossible 
or impracticable. The fact that it is antagonistic 
to him may be realized with varying degrees of 
consciousness. That is, he may attribute his re- 
jection of it to conscious motives, whereas the mo- 
tives in this case are largely unconscious. 

Six months later he may carry out the idea into 
action. He has in some instances then forgotten 
the origin of the idea and it bobs up into his own 
mind without being associated with the antagonis- 
tic personality who originally suggested it to him. 
He then accepts it as his own idea, supposes he has 
thought it all out himself, and forgets that it was 
put into his head for the first time by some one 
whom he hates or hated. 

In the existence of this idea in his mind during 
the six months mentioned we see the nucleus of a 
dual personality. The idea had a compelling force 
of its own, so to speak, and, after shaking off the 
unpleasant associations with the hated man, re- 
appears in a form attractive to the man who later 
carries it out. None of us can successfully trace to 



86 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

their sources all the ideas that occur to us. But 
with the proper analytic technique some of these 
ideas may be so traced. Effort to recall past scenes 
and incidents is not generally well sustained by the 
average individual, nor is the truly scientific 
method of so doing known to a large number of per- 
sons. If they did know how to do so, they would 
be able to understand and account for every im- 
portant idea and action of their lives. 

§ 5. The Medium 

Ordinarily, however, we lead mentally a compara- 
tively irregular existence, stirred to action by mo- 
tives partially accounted for and by blind instincts 
and compulsions. The thesis of this book is that 
all so-called communications, instead of being from 
a conscious control by another personality, physic- 
ally separate from the medium, are in reality from 
an unconscious control by a secondary or subsidiary 
personality of the medium himself or herself. In 
the average man or woman leading a reasonably ex- 
traversional existence, the unconscious wishes do 
not have the opportunity to become compressed into 
other subsidiary personalities. In the medium, 
who is of a more or less introversional nature, the 
unconscious wishes do have this opportunity. 

The medium says : " The spirits of A and B and 
C are here; is there any one of them with whom 
you would particularly care to communicate? " 
" Well," says the unprejudiced spectator, " I knew 
B when he was alive. Has he any message for 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 87 

me?" And the medium, whether or not in a 
trance, proceeds to give forth information about B, 
the triviality of which is considered, by those most 
interested, as the best kind of evidence. " How 
could the medium have known the kind of jack- 
knife my grandfather cut his nails with? " If the 
medium could be proved not to have been able to 
know such classes of things, and produces more of 
this kind of information than could be accounted 
for by the law of probability of lucky guesses, then 
the communications are considered proven. It 
thus turns out that the most trivial and otherwise 
most insignificant details acquire, as proofs, the 
greatest weight, and become most significant in the 
eyes of the believers of spiritism. It is much like 
proving a line of beauty by means of minute anat- 
omy of the human form possessing it. 

And it is to be noted that this kind of so-called 
" communication " is regarded by those who desire 
survival, as a proof of the survival, in some inex- 
plicable and indescribable psychic condition, of the 
soul apart from the body, without really adequate 
scientific knowledge and definition of what the 
" soul " is, when it is in the body. 

§ 6. Unconscious Trends 

As will later be seen, there are, in the uncon- 
scious, various trends that might be arranged in a 
sort of hierarchy of relative strength. One of these 
is sex, and another is self. Freud has, with log- 
ical consistency, reported what he found in his 



88 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

patients, and has come to the conclusion that sex, 
interpreted very broadly, is the main unconscious 
motive for human conscious activity. Jung, the 
founder of the Zurich school of psychoanalysis, says 
that sex and other unconscious cravings are alike 
forms of another and higher vital urge. Both 
agree that the unconscious craving, whatever it 
may be called, is seen in the acts and conduct of 
all persons, whether they be conventional actions 
or the most unusual type of behaviour imaginable. 
The most sensational of the eccentricities, im- 
pulsive and irrational actions are seen in the con- 
scious expression of the unconscious sex wishes, 
and some psychoanalysts have revealed these so 
clearly that the popular mind has the impression 
that psychoanalysis regards them as the sole mo- 
tives for all conduct. Therefore the opponents 
have seized upon this one aspect of the unconscious 
craving, and have reasoned fallaciously as follows, 
basing their statements on their misconception of 
the doctrine of repression. " According to this 
theory the best people would be the worst, and 
vice versa. We repress what we will not have in 
the conscious mind. . . . The purest minded man 
or woman, then — according to this doctrine — is 
not the one who has the purest conscious mind, but 
the purest subconscious mind — that is, one who 
has let out all the bad it contains, and retained 
none! So that the more vilely we act, the more 
foul mouthed we are, the purer we are as a mat- 
ter of fact. What a delightful doctrine! Does it 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 89 

not occur to the Freudians that we are only re- 
sponsible for the content of our conscious minds? 
Unless we bring the contents of the subconscious 
mind to the light and gloat over it as the Freudians 
do, we should never know that we had one — most 
of us. Yet according to them, this is the man — 
this muck heap — this is the real man! " (Here- 
ward Carrington: Modern Psychical Phenomena, 
N. Y. 1919, page 22.) 

Psychoanalysis makes no such statement as that 
the best people are the worst and vice versa, re- 
garding as it does all people as being in the main 
trends of their unconscious cravings pretty much 
alike, the chief difference probably being in the 
relative strength of these cravings, and not in the 
specific acts in which they are expressed. 

Furthermore it is not alone the evil propensities 
that are repressed, but in not a few people good im- 
pulses are consciously repressed as will be quite 
manifest to any one who examines carefully his 
own life. As if realizing that wholesomeness and 
good feeling alone are constructive and progressive, 
the libido, which is the quintessence of what in its 
highest form is love, sends up from the most funda- 
mental depths many an impulse to do a friendly 
act, which some conscious fear represses. That 
only the asocial act and thought is repressed would 
never be asserted by any analyst in good repute, 
nor that the unconscious wish is wholly bad. 

That the best people are the worst is far too sim- 
ple a statement to represent the very complicated 



90 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

relations between consciousness and the uncon- 
scious. Also it appears that people who make such 
statements ignore, or are ignorant of, the principle 
of sublimation which in every case parallels re- 
pression. Psychoanalysis regards the unconscious 
wish as being transformed in every case by the 
social environment, beginning in earliest infancy, 
taking shape and specific nature from the manners 
and customs of the intimates of the individual per- 
sonality. This process which diverts the wish from 
a merely egoistic one, sublimates the desire, which, 
though changed in actual content, retains its primal 
force. Thus the egoistic, unconscious craving for 
mastery is transformed or sublimated into the con- 
scious wish for constructive leadership, the crassly 
sexual is sublimated into the highest forms of love. 

When an opponent of psychoanalysis, which 
means one who does not understand it, or who fears 
it, says that we repress what we will not have in 
the conscious mind, he errs in not saying we re- 
press what we fear to have in the conscious mind. 
And fear may be attached by any person to almost 
anything, depending on the situation in which he 
finds himself. And if it is true that we repress 
into the unconscious what we will not have in the 
conscious mind, we are guided as to what we will 
by the opinions of other people, rarely or never by 
our own, the moral norm being set by the environ- 
ment. 

Thus the fear is the fear of the disapproval or 
other hostile action of others with whom we live 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 91 

in contact. Or it may be the fear we feel toward 
the disapproval, etc., of some imaginary personal- 
ity — some personality we have rationally or irra- 
tionally constructed out of our own impressions, 
true or false. This personality may indeed be the 
ideal we have formed of ourselves as we should like 
to be. Then we say we fear to do something out 
of self-respect, we scorn such actions, we are too 
proud to think such thoughts; but the whole sit- 
uation, whether real or imaginary, whether it con- 
sists of ideas, or desires, is controlled by fear, or 
some might call it aversion, against doing or think- 
ing of certain kinds. Thus a very courageous per- 
son might not like to use the word fear about him- 
self, but would say that the actions he considered 
ignoble w r ere beneath him. And in any case, 
whether they are the thoughts or actions of a 
courageous or a timid person, they are repressed 
into the unconscious. The evil thoughts or im- 
pulses which, if he followed them out, would lead 
either kind of person to do ill, may originate within 
his own personality, i. e., in his own unconscious 
or they may be suggested to him from without, by 
evil companions, for example. In the latter case 
the evil impulses contained within the unconscious, 
after having been repressed into it, would be both 
endogenous and acquired. 

So. that a good person, according to the misstate- 
ment above quoted, would be still better if the evil 
impulses originating within were increased by some 
others originating without. He would increase his 



92 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

goodness by accumulating repressed evil that was 
gathered from as many extraneous sources as pos- 
sible. He would become better by more and more 
closely associating with criminals, receiving bj 
force of example more and more anti-social im- 
pulses and repressing them into his unconscious as 
he received them. Only in this way could he im- 
prove his character, according to the misstatements 
noticed above. 

Therefore I wish to utter a warning as definite 
and emphatic as possible, that those who represent 
psychoanalysis as teaching any such contradictory 
doctrine are completely misrepresenting it. Never 
having themselves been analysed, they have no in- 
side knowledge of what are the real aims of psycho- 
analysis, and they fear what psychoanalysis may 
ultimately prove about the ideas they have accepted. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 

/ § 1. Resistance to Knowledge 

There are several reasons why people in general, 
and, among them, spiritists, should be unwilling to 
learn the main facts that have been thus far sci- 
entifically ascertained about the unconscious. One 
of these reasons is the at first unpleasant, not to 
say horrible, nature of the facts themselves, re- 
garded from a purely conventional standpoint. To 
say that in each of us there lives not merely a cave 
man or woman but a Titan of heroic force, just 
" under the skin " and that a little amount of ob- 
servation and study will reveal him to any one of 
us is saying something that the average person will 
not take any interest in hearing, but I shall later 
show that it is indispensable for those interested in 
spiritism to know as much of it as they can. 

The other cause for the unwillingness of the av- 
erage person to learn the main facts of the working 
of the unconscious mentality is their exceeding com- 
plexity. 

One of the problems of mathematics most re- 
luctantly attacked by young people in school is that 
of permutations and combinations, a problem that 
is presented to them by enthusiastic pedagogues 
too early, before they are consciously capable of 

93 



94 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

continuing a strain of attention too long. The 
teacher of almost any object finds the question: 
" In how many and in what orders can three dif- 
ferent items be presented?" an almost insuperable 
matter to the pupil even of high school age, 
although the clear view of such a question not only 
makes much comprehensible that was not so before, 
but also this slight mental gymnastic exercise when 
completely mastered even simplifies much of the 
matter to be studied, and gives a feeling' of power 
quite satisfying. But only a few people can be 
induced to do even this slight amount of mental 
work, which is different from merely straight re- 
membering. Mere memory allows the mind to glide 
along a beaten path from one image to another, 
and in most people is the easiest of mental work. 
But ask them to change the order of the items ac- 
cording to a certain plan and the mental energy 
required to do this is unavailable, because so much 
has already been used up in the usual uncontrolled 
phantasy type of memory. The mere vision of 
three objects in all possible orders as : 

abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba, 

fills the mind with an uneasy sense of perplexity 
and instinctively the child's and many adults' minds 
shrink from the mental strain of continuing the 
necessary mental effort. To require a beginning 
Latin student to write or even say : 

Caesar bellum facit. 
Caesar facit bellum. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 95 

Bellum Caesar facit. 
Bellum facit Caesar. 
Facit Caesar bellum. 
Facit bellum Caesar. 

and to realize that they all mean practically the 
same, differing only in emphasis, is an almost in- 
human requirement, although an ability to do this 
is indicative of a high degree of mental control and 
helps to fix the functions of the Latin cases. 

In learning a foreign language or even a bit of 
grammar in English, the same complexity of ma- 
terial and simplicity of mental state of the learner 
is found. Take the elementary sentence: Tom 
steals a pig, and ask any child, that knows the dif- 
ference between active and passive, to change 
merely the form of the sentence, from active to pas- 
sive, but retain exactly the same idea, and you will 
find that many will say Tom stole the pig, confus- 
ing past with passive, or The pig stole Tom, just 
reversing the sense. Very rarely will you get the 
first time the correct answer : The pig is stolen by 
Tom. The further transformations that are pos- 
sible in expressing practically the same ideas with 
(1) a simple sentence or (2) a complex sentence^ 
are complexities of variously increasing manifold- 
ness. Thus Tom, the piper's son, steals a pig, has 
to be made into a complex sentence of exactly the 
same meaning Tom, who is the piper's son, steals 
a pig. In this transformation the appositive, " the 
piper's son " is turned into a relative clause. If 



96 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

a child is told to turn " piper's " into a preposi- 
tional phrase modifying " son," just as " the 
piper's " does, he is generally non-plussed and only 
after some very unwilling effort on his part can he 
be made to see that Tom, who is the son of the piper, 
is what is wanted. All these changes, simple as 
they appear to the trained English student, are pos- 
sible to the simple mind only with great effort. 

There is a game called " Packing My Bag." In a 
circle of people one starts saying : " I packed my 
bag, putting into it a tooth brush " ; the next says : 
" I put into it a tooth brush and a hair brush " ; the 
third : " I put in a tooth brush, a hair brush and a 
comb." The fourth repeats the three articles and 
adds another, and so on until the bag contains so 
many articles that some one person will either leave 
one out or mention it in the wrong order. For 
some people the game exercises only a certain kind 
of memory, which normally breaks down after a 
while, but in all the players there is required a kind 
of concrete thinking of a very low order, but still 
straining the attention. Various people's reaction 
to this game is variously amusing and edifying. 

In the game the strain is that of keeping their 
minds on one thing (the series of articles) ; in the 
grammar exercise it is not merely remembering 
Tom, the piper's son, steals a pig, but remembering 
the whole of it and changing a part of it. Both 
" Tom, the piper's son " and " Tom, the son of the 
piper," have to be kept in consciousness at the same 
time. That is the cause of the strain. Conscious- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 97 

ness, like a spring hinge, has to be opened to take in 
two things at once side by side, so to speak, and it 
does not naturally do that. Naturally it takes in 
only one thing at a time. Minds have to be arti- 
ficially stretched to accommodate at once con- 
sciously more than a single unitary experience. 
Even the mechanic of average ability is unable to 
use two wrenches at once, one in the right hand 
and one in the left. 

To every single idea the whole body responds 
as an integral unit with a single muscular set or 
11 postural tonus/' and two ideas side by side cause 
at first a real physical dead-lock, which, in the 
phrase Tom, the son of the piper, is increased by 
the fact that it is not the original or real phrase. 
Any change is making something into something 
that it is not, and such a change is one that goes 
against the whole muscular set of the entire body, 
particularly if that muscular set is associated wrth 
any degree of comfort or pleasurable emotion. 

Any exercise done and accomplished, even with 
a mistake in it, is associated with comfort or pleas- 
ure just because it is accomplished. To correct 
the error negates that pleasure. To change what 
is produces discomfort and displeasure in the ma- 
jority of young people, and is not undertaken vol- 
untarily. Here again the complicated external 
world produces a simple organic reaction in the 
mind-body combination. In order to change the 
complexity of an external thing (here a set of 
words) the child has to produce in himself a change 



98 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

of his whole muscular set. He has to feel different, 
and he does not naturally want to feel different, 
because feeling the same is easy and therefore pleas- 
urable, and feeling different is hard and therefore 
unpleasant. 
Similarly if he has put down : 

72 
38 



574 
216 

2634 

and has taken satisfaction out of the fact that it is 
down and done, he will naturally revolt, to the con- 
fines of his being, when he is told that the first 
thing, and the next to the last, are wrong, and that 
if it were dollars he would be out $102. 

The pleasure of completion attaches to whatever 
is completed. Therefore if it is completed wrongly, 
in any detail, it is a cause of displeasure to be re- 
quired to change it. The necessary conclusion 
from this is that in educating the young, one has to 
aim both at getting a correct version the first time, 
and at associating pleasure with the act of chang- 
ing or correcting the young person's performance, if 
it should be wrong. The pleasure ordinarily asso- 
ciated with the act of correcting is generally the 
pleasure of the teacher. But what I mean here is 
pleasure on the part of the learner. Getting this 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 99 

pleasure is getting the best out of external reality. 
Here external reality in the shape of words actually 
spoken or written, sums added or even thoughts 
thought if they be thought according to the com- 
plicated modes in which things in the real world 
exist, — external reality is the only wholesome ob- 
ject for the psyche to function against, without 
which object it never grows but remains infantile, 
spending itself introversionally in idle phantasying. 
The psychical researcher is phantasying all the 
time. 

Education is a training of the mind like a vine 
on a trellis, but the true education not only trains 
the vine upon the trellis but makes first the trellis 
to train the vine on. Back of that still is the idea 
in the mind of the deviser of the trellis, and that 
idea must be formed in a way to carry out some 
union of psyche and object. 

§ 2. Complexity 

Natural curiosity will not carry far. It is easily 
satisfied. Many a child's curiosity extends only far 
enough to test its own strength, as to whether it 
can break this or that thing. A curiosity to see 
things go around is partly that; but partly of a 
slightly higher order, if it tries to find out why one 
of a series of meshed wheels goes one way and the 
next another. To find out how many times one 
goes around while another is going once, would, in 
connection with other traits, show a very high order 
of mentality. 



100 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

Curiosity is only one form of mental activity, 
and refers outward or inward indifferently. Those 
whose mental energy takes an exclusively or pre- 
dominantly outward direction have been scientists 
and have discovered many facts about the external 
world, including the relations of thoughts, that are 
of the greatest advantage to all persons who can 
properly assimilate these facts. The grossest of 
these are the discoveries and inventions of the phys- 
ical sciences of today, as a result of which there has 
been so much constructive and destructive mechan- 
ical work done. The gross physical inventions and 
discoveries can be assimilated by very ordinary 
minds. But there are other scientific discoveries 
which concern solely the human psyche — discov- 
eries that cannot be easily assimilated by the mind 
without a high degree of mental energy. The tele- 
graphs, telephones, railways and factories show 
that this kind of invention can be handled by almost 
any one. 

But it is not so with the latest psychological con- 
ceptions, nor with the most recent conceptions in 
pure physics, e. g., the theories of Einstein. And 
the concepts of the most modern psychology of the 
unconscious also require for their assimilation a 
high degree of ability to think two or even more 
series of thoughts at the same time. The concepts 
of psychoanalysis are more complicated than thoso 
used in any other set of principles, just because tho 
human system is more complicated than any othef ' 
vital system in the world. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN UEGE 101 

§ 3. Non-conscious Ideas and Feelings 

M The existence of ideas and feelings, even though 
they are not in consciousness, is an absolutely in- 
contestable fact. Saying that they are in con- 
sciousness may be a figure of speech, but represents 
a real fact, without which no experience is pos- 
sible. When they are not " in " consciousness, they 
are in some other place, which we call the " Un- 
conscious." Whether it is a. place or not, or 
whether we imagine the ideas and feelings as merely 
dormant cells in brain or nerves, which, when elec- 
trified, produce consciousness, matters little. At 
any rate the point is that, like moths about a light 
at night, these things we call ideas, thoughts, feel- 
ings or any other me'ntal state or activity, come and 
go, and have just as real an existence, whether or 
not they have previously been seen or in any other 
way apperceived. 

A certain amount of energy is necessary of course 
to make a transit from the unconscious into con- 
scious life, or, in other words, for a stimulus to 
cause an actual sensation. An enormous amount 
of physical energy is probably absorbed from the ex- 
ternal world and transformed into mental activity 
which never reaches consciousness. Proofs for the 
unconscious mentality are unnecessary to give here, 
as they are amply given in other books. No psy- 
choanalytical investigation is ever carried on with- 
out discovering an unconscious mental activity 
which has attached itself to some bodily function 
instead of being liberated into consciousness, or 



102 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

into the external world through movement (uncon- 
scious) or action (conscious). 

The pressure of external stimuli upon the sen- 
sorium is only partly transformed into conscious- 
ness. A great part of the effects of natural ex- 
ternal causes, chemical, mechanical and other, is 
turned into bodily heat, the formation of various 
tissues and their secretions. What is turned into 
consciousness would, in view of the comparatively 
late appearance of consciousness in animal evolu- 
tion, be a very small part of the energy which is im- 
pinging upon the various receptor organs of the 
body, both external and internal. Those amounts 
of physical energy which fail to attain that mini- 
mum degree of summation which makes them avail- 
able for transmutation into consciousness, do never- 
theless constitute a very valuable and potent source 
of change and development in the human psyche. 

We may regard consciousness itself as in some 
sense analogous to a light in a dark night which 
makes things visible to the eye. A small candle 
will illuminate only a very small area, a stronger 
though more distant light may give greater illumi- 
nation over a greater area. The animal life is at- 
tracted by the light. Those living things which 
have the greatest curiosity will come nearest to the 
light and be most clearly visible. But the others 
exist and nature's grand economy is not altered 
even if no candle or arc light is present. Thus we 
may regard the groups of energy ordered into or- 
ganisms which unite to form the greater organism 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 103 

of the human body. They come into existence and 
perform their functions whether or not they are 
illuminated with the light of consciousness. But 
we believe that psychoanalytic technique is anal- 
ogous to the intensification of the light in the ft rest 
at night. 

If we had certain friends who displeased us, and 
we sent them away from us into the dark so that 
we could not see them, we might find that they later 
turned into enemies and conspired with creatures 
of darkness to undo us. This is the nature of the 
activity of the emotions that are repressed into 
the unconscious. On the other hand an increase in 
the candle power of the light we were carrying 
might render visible some opposing forces lurking 
in the underbrush, which after observation and 
planning and training might be turned into friendly 
powers in place of being hostile. There is nothing 
like illumination for turning obstructions into a 
good roadbed. 

So that the conclusion is reached that conscious- 
ness may be extended in the sense not only of sud- 
den expansion like the intensification of light just 
mentioned, but also of a possibility of moving about, 
from one place to another in the night of the uncon- 
scious, a light of constant candle power. Such a 
person would be one who was willing to take his 
light in hand and fare forth in the night in quest 
of adventure. There are persons, too, whose light, 
through love, becomes suddenly brighter and there 
are others, the geniuses, whose light is originally, 



104 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

and for ever regains, intense, so that they see more 
clearly and more deeply into the nature of things 
and their causes. 

There is a pitch of activity of the unconscious 
mird which cannot be raised without making it 
cither visible or audible or perceptible in some other 
sense quality. This represents consciousness, as 
it were, as a stationary thing with other things com- 
ing to meet it. If being furnished with a compara- 
tively large amount of energy, they succeed in ap- 
proaching near enough to the aura of consciousness, 
they may be said to enter consciousness of them- 
selves. But consciousness may be regarded, too, 
as going out to meet things, in which respect, while 
things are not stationary and some even flee at the 
approach of consciousness, they may still be illu- 
minated by its light and become visible. 

Such fugitive mental elements are the internal 
sensations. They flee at the approach of conscious- 
ness. Not only do they not enter consciousness, but 
many of them may not be caught. We are forced, 
however, to infer their existence and somewhat of 
their nature. We deduce certain modes of their 
activity and give names to them, and the act of nam- 
ing them tends to give them a " local habitation " 
and a clearer conception of their functions. We 
get thereby a means of controlling them simply by 
naming them, almost as if in so doing we organized 
them and thus created out of an apparent chaos an 
organism or unit which before did not exist. As in 
algebra we perform many operations with unknown 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 105 

quantities before we know their value, so we do in 
the study of the unconscious perform many opera- 
tions according to discovered principles before we 
can tell just what the nature and value of the un- 
known quality is in concrete and sensory terms. 

I said that a great amount of physical energy is 
absorbed from the external world and transformed 
into a kind of mental energy which never succeeds 
in reaching consciousness. It may be objected that 
the energy which does not reach consciousness can 
in no sense be called mental. Perhaps I should 
call it potentially mental energy. That absorbed 
into the body from the external world may be said 
to be on the pathway toward becoming mental in/ 
a sense impossible for the sunlight to be called po- 
tentially mental, when it melts a piece of ice. Pos- 
sibly the animal organism is destined ultimately 
to evolve into a perfect mechanism for transform- 
ing into mental energy or consciousness all the 
energy which affects it. Evidently that end has 
not yet been reached, but every form of physical 
energy that enters the human body through the 
multitudinous avenues is taking the first upward 
step toward transmutation into pure consciousness, 
just as the clod " climbs to a soul in grass and 
flowers." In this light every particle of human 
tissue is a source of at least potential mental (even 
conscious) energy. 

What then is it that will actively, from the con- 
scious side, help to transform more of that poten- 
tially mental into perceptively actively mental 



106 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

(i. e., conscious) energy? This includes the ques- 
tion as to what will render conscious the stimuli 
exciting not only the external peripheral sense or- 
gans but also the internal peripheral sense organs. 
Or, otherwise stated, what will render conscious 
the internal impressions so as to enable them to be 
perceived as conscious sensations? The answer to 
the last question will be the same as that concern- 
ing the rendering conscious of any external sensa- 
tion, i. e., by means of the attention being directed 
to it by ideas expressed in words. 

A good illustration of the practically creative 
effect of verbally directed (conceptually directed) 
attention is the creation of constellations in the 
stars of the night. The ancient way was to imagine 
that some hero was taken up into heaven and placed 
there as a constellation. This expressed the fact 
that then for the first time were those infinitely dis- 
tant suns grouped mentally by the hearers of the 
myth. A modern parallel is heard every time a 
child is shown the dipper on a summer evening. 
Before this breathless occasion it is quite likely 
that the child has seen but been unconscious of all 
the seven stars. But after it, what had been po- 
tentially mental becomes actually mental or con- 
scious. 

§ 4. Rgassociation 

Similarly we are taught not only to reassociate 
consciously perceived emotions with ideas other 
than those with which they were originally asso- 
ciated, but we are taught to feel emotions of which, 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN UKGE 107 

previous to instruction, we were totally uncon- 
scious, and this in addition to the emotions so 
numerous at the time of puberty, which force them- 
selves upon us in forms consciously mental to be 
sure, but many degrees removed from the direct 
causes. 

Those who read the steadily accumulating litera- 
ture on the sexual instinct cannot but be impressed 
by the multifariousness of the ways by which the 
instinct enters consciousness, to what remarkable 
ideas and inferences it gives rise, and how the same 
condition inspires one person with repugnance and 
another with pleasure ; furthermore how frequently 
in the same person a sensation evidently caused by 
a purely sexual internal sensation can be trans- 
formed from a pleasure into a pain and vice versa. 

In this we have a very strong proof not only of 
the existence of potentially mental states in this 
sphere (and why not also in any others?), but als6 
of the ready .tran.smut ability of the feeling into its 
opposite; unless indeed we choose to believe that 
pleasure and pain, as they are productive of ana- 
bolism and catabolism respectively, are the con- 
scious forms of two separate and mutually exclusive 
internal sensations. 

§ 5. Occurrence 

The occurrence into consciousness of things that 
have been perceived unconsciously before is a very 
noticeable phenomenon. I am sitting thinking and 
suddenly realize that it is 5.15, at which time I am 



108 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

to so something different. I am asleep in bed and 
suddenly wake up and find it is '6.30 at which time 
I had determined to get up this morning. I am 
talking with a person, listening and replying, and 
suddenly get the idea that he is insincere in what 
he says. I am reading in the winter afternoon and 
suddenly realize that it is too dark to read with 
comfort, and I turn on the light. I am going into 
a store to buy something and suddenly realize that 
I have not enough cash with me. I am working 
with the greatest enthusiasm and suddenly note 
that I am both hungry and stiff and tired. I am 
talking with a girl and suddenly realize that her 
teeth or her eyes ( or anything else ! ) are much pret- 
tier than I had ever thought them before. I was 
listening to a new record on a phonograph. I 
thought it was the Angel's Serenade of Braga, 
when suddenly to my chagrin I realized that it was 
the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria. 

All these are sudden entries into consciousness, 
some of them with and some without an emotional 
tone. But they are entrances of something which 
was in the unconscious a minute before. In the 
case of the day growing darker, there was a dimin- 
ishing stimulus. In that of the girl there was an 
increasing stimulus, in that of the absence of money 
an unchanging stimulus! In all cases, however, 
the stimulus was present, in the unconscious part 
of the mind, quite a while before it came into con- 
sciousness. So it appears to make no difference 
what the change in stimulus is, or whether, as in 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 109 

the case of the money, there is no change! For 
consciousness however to continue, there must be a 
change in consciousness, as it has been shown over 
and over again that without change of quality there 
is no consciousness. 

The change then must be in me. In the money 
illustration the change is because a new desire for 
money has developed in me. In the case of the 
girl, she has talked with me long enough for me to 
note unconsciously her hair, her forehead, her nose, 
her chin, her neck, her ears. There has been a 
change in the number of stimuli entering conscious- 
ness. They have become more numerous. In the 
case of the approaching darkness there has been a 
change in real things. The light has actually 
grown less, and it has required more and more 
effort on my part to see things. In the case of the 
sudden realization of the time of day, the change 
is entirely mental. I mean the change which is 
constituted by the sudden realization of the time of 
day. It is entirely a matter of my own action and 
reaction, external reality not having changed in the 
least, unless we may say that the ticking of a dis- 
tant clock for about 15,000 times during the eight 
hours I was asleep was something that would be 
counted by me even in sleep, and would wake me 
up when the proper number had been ticked off, and 
that some variety of alarm bell was rung by the un- 
conscious to arouse me. If the ticking of a distant 
clock, inaudible even to attentive consciousness, or 
the striking of the hours is the change in external 



110 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

reality which causes me to wake up, this requires 
us to suppose that the unconscious has powers not 
ordinarily attributed to it. 

On the one hand it must be supposed to be able 
to perceive intensities which are too low for con- 
sciousness to perceive. This is, however, quite con- 
ceivable when we consider how all sensation is a 
form of consciousness which is caused by the sum- 
mation of impressions which are severally imper- 
ceptible. Thus the vibrations of the air or the ether 
which separately make each an impression upon 
some part of the end organ of the ear or the eye 
are not perceptible to consciousness. It is only a 
fusion of these separate impressions which makes 
a sensation of tone or of colour. 

On the other hand we shall have to attribute to 
the unconscious part of the mind an ability to count 
the hours as they are struck in the other room, or at 
least an ability to recognize six from any other 
jinmber. 

Another instance of the power of the unconscious 
' to do what consciousness cannot do is seen in the 
ability of »a person to understand more than he can 
express. This is seen in the comparative ease with 
which one can learn to understand what is said in 
a foreign language, even though one cannot speak 
it as well as one can understand it. It is quite 
the opposite in learning to write shorthand and to 
telegraph. One can learn much more easily to send 
messages and to write shorthand than one can learn 
to read what is written or to take down the tele- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 111 

graphic message. But in the case of spoken lan- 
guage, there is no doubt that the words of a for- 
eigner are more easily understood than replied to, 
and the reason lies in the fact that much of what 
is heard is not clearly or completely heard. The 
unconscious of the hearer detects what is inaudible 
to him consciously and supplies the meaning by 
other channels than sound. In the native pro- 
nunciation of a foreign language some of the sounds 
which are made are in colloquial conversation so 
slurred over as almost to constitute different sounds 
and the total effect of the part of the word that is 
audible to consciousness is quite different from the 
full words as they are expected by consciousness. 

There is the further consideration that a great 
many if not all children in learning to talk their 
mother tongue are continually talked to by adults 
who use words which the children do not under- 
stand separately. In context they are understood. 
This may indicate that understanding consists in 
the ability to react appropriately with actions, not 
words. In this case the words as words need 
hardly be understood at all, and the proper use of 
them as words may not ever be learned. But from 
their earliest infancy all children are continually 
talked to as if they understood and finally they 
understand. The final understanding comes some- 
times in a flash of illumination which is almost a 
surprise to the child. It can be only that there is a 
long process of building up of relations between 
words and acts, and until the building is finished 



112 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

no part of it is, so to speak, visible to consciousness./ 
The becoming conscious of a relation is a unique 
experience associated with a distinctly pleasurable 
feeling. There is this source of pleasure frequently 
to those who have the occasion to study the history 
of words and learn the relations in which things 
were held by other people in bygone times. Fre- 
quently this sudden becoming aware of a similarity 
or a difference is quite unaccountable and one won- 
ders why one has not seen the relation before. 
Such a sudden emergence came to my mental eyes 
recently when I seemed for the first time to realize 
that " servant " and " conservation " are both de- 
rivatives of the word " serve " which meant in 
Roman times to watch or guard. But such is the 
present character of servants that one expects very 
little conservation in their actions. 

Occasionally too one comes upon a bit of poetry 
in the history of a word which is impossible to 
read without knowing the word's history. Nuance 
is the same word with but a metaphorical change 
of meaning as the Latin Nubes, a cloud. What 
richness of imagery may one not arouse in one's 
mind by the memory of that origin for that word. 
And sometimes we find in the history of a word a 
humorous touch as from that of caterpillar which 
is our present burnished pronunciation of cattus 
pillatus or " hairy cat." 

My notion is that a great many of such relations 
are under favourable conditions as readily manifest 
to consciousness as is the relation -between " serv- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 113 

ant " and " conservation," but that on account of 
the opposition such as is felt between those two 
ideas of servants and conservation the verbal re- 
lation is entirely obscured or is forced into the un- 
conscious, where, however, it is none the less clear. 
To one who knows the meaning of presbyopia (old 
man's sight defect) the original meaning of pres- 
byterian (pertaining to a council of old men) is 
probably quite ready in the unconscious, and needs 
only some illuminating situation to bring it into 
consciousness. Similarly for senior and senate. 
The bond between joy, jewellery, and gaud is not so 
likely to emerge on account of the difference in the 
spelling and pronunciation of the words, while in 
non compos and nincompoop it is a matter of in- 
dividual vocabulary. 

But the relations between things are always evi- 
dent to the unconscious, that has received retinal 
photographs of them, or indeed any kind of sensory 
reports of them. Of certain relations of things 
most of us become conscious only after our atten- 
tion is called to them. Observation is the name ap- 
plied to a trait in persons into whose mind such re- 
lations either come naturally or have been intro- 
duced by training. Classical examples of this sun- 
burst of consciousness are Archimedes' " Eureka," 
when it suddenly occurred to him in his historic 
bath tub that specific gravity would test the gen- 
uineness of King Hero's crown, and Newton's real- 
ization that the moon and the apple were both 
drawn toward the earth by the same force. 



114 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

Ever\ one can give illustrations from his own 
experiences how certain old familiar sights have 
suddenly " struck " him with a new meaning. The 
appropriateness of this violent word is quite evi- 
dent. The significance of certain things sometimes 
blazes out with lightning illumination and arouses 
the emotion which goads one on to action. The 
blindness of average humanity to the relation of 
identity is illustrated by the use of the formula 
appended to many notices : " This means you ! ' 
The blindness of them that have eyes and yet see 
not, and the feeling of surprise when they do see is 
illustrated by the school child who was amazed to 
learn that the Mississippi River she was learning 
about in her geography lesson was the same Missis- 
sippi that ran past her back door. 

§ 6. Current Conscious Psychology 

Picture a rope 100 feet long hanging from a cross- 
beam over a well more than 100 feet deep. If the 
visible part of the rope is pulled sidewise and re- 
leased, it will fly back to its original position be- 
cause of the weight of the 95 feet of invisible rope. 
Presently the visible part of the rope will be seen 
to vibrate, although untouched. The observer, if 
ignorant of almost every principle of physics, might 
very well be " amazed " at the rope moving itself 
again and again with gradually decreasing ampli- 
tude. He could not see the part of the rope hang- 
ing in the well, and possibly " to gain some private 
end " of self -mystification, might refuse to think of 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 115 

the possibility of there being any rope below the 
surface of the ground. We might tell him that we 
know it is there; we saw it before it was lowered 
into the well ; we put it there ourselves, or anything 
else; but he would not believe it. So persistently 
does he deny it that we begin to wonder what may 
be the private end he may be wishing to gain, which 
prevents him from inferring the almost obvious. 
Possibly he may have some unpleasant associations 
with ropes' ends and may wish to believe that ropes 
have not any unattached ends! So persistently 
have the conscious philosophers denied the exist- 
ence of the unconscious, because it is immeasurable, 
invisible, imperceptible and only inferential. 

And yet Kulpe (page 446) speaks of the "co- 
operation of unconscious incentives to reproduc- 
tion " as nothing unusual, and (450) says: "Em- 
pirical psychology has no occasion to endow this 
unconscious with any but a purely physiological 
existence. We have only found one case which 
seems to contradict this rule : the case in which an 
unconscious state exerts a perceptible influence on 
consciousness. But here we really have a conscious 
process, whose sole difference from the other con- 
scious processes of the time is its impossibility of 
separate perception. There are two connections in 
which these unconscious components are especially 
important : those of fusion and attention. The con- 
stituents of the conscious field of regard in the state 
of attention generally form an unanalysed total 
impression ; though any alteration or disappearance 



116 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

among them is remarked at once. The ' uncon- 
scious ' in this sense is therefore, in reality some- 
thing conscious, something which contributes in 
noticeable degree to the psychical process of the 
moment. It is essentially different from the ' un- 
conscious,' in the strict meaning of the term, of 
which we can only say that it may possibly serve as 
an incentive to the reproduction of the experience 
with which it was once correlated. In the process 
of apperception in particular, the number of uncon- 
scious constituents in the total sum of incentives 
to reproduction may be very considerable.'' And 
on page 452 : " The connection and interpretation 
of the dream consciousness is so essentially differ- 
ent from 'those of the ideas of the waking life. 
There is no will to direct and regulate the train of 
thought." 

Such statements as these give us a clue to why 
the experimental conscious psychologists of the re- 
action time variety are so resolutely unwilling to 
consider the paramount importance of the uncon- 
scious. They would have to change so much of 
their systems, would have to unsay so much of them- 
selves as to amount practically to self-annihilation. 
Their ideas in large numbers would have to be con- 
signed to the scrap heap, and scrap heaps are not 
popular except with more progressive communities. 
This is the reason why psychoanalysis is not taught 
in most colleges and universities. It is too new and 
too radical, and requires too much readjustment on 
the part of both teacher and student. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 117 

i 
§ 7. The Unconscious an Hypothesis 

The unconscious is of course not a state of mind 
of which we can become directly aware. It is, on 
the other hand, a working hypothesis, a supposi- 
tion necessary to explain the sequence of thoughts 
in the stream of consciousness ; but, as a hypothesis, 
it has worked so well that a great many extraor- 
dinary thought occurrences in normal waking life 
are explained by it. Also the bizarre and appar- 
ently disconnected episodes of the dream of the 
night have been shown, by this theory of the un- 
conscious, to have a psychological, if not always a 
formal logical, connection. And in abnormal psy- 
chology the utterances and acts of those suffering 
from even the major psychoses are better under- 
stood by means of this theory, which posits that the 
ideas which occur to the dementia precox patient 
occur according to the same laws that govern the 
most logical and intellectual productions of the 
highest type of mental development. 

Before a thought enters consciousness it can 
hardly be termed a thought, but is more like an in- 
definite yearning for something, a sense of dis- 
satisfaction with life in general, or if, for a consid- 
erable time, it fails to achieve expression as thought 
or act, it is in consciousness only as a mild anxiety 
or mental restlessness. It is like a shapeless cloud 
on the horizon on an otherwise clear day, or like a 
filmy veil of cloud which sometimes in September 
afternoons comes before the sun, and we suddenly 



118 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

realize that the sun is not as bright as we thought 
it was. On looking up we see the thin " mackerel 
sky " cloud effect. 

By inference from our own experience and from 
that of a number of other observers, which is be- 
coming larger every year, we can see the work of 
the unconscious in some people clouding their 
mental sky, in others shining like the noonday 
sun. But while the theory of the unconscious is 
only an inference from consciously observable facts, 
it is an inference of so highly logical a character 
that no one has successfully assailed it or shown 
that it is in any way fallacious. 

§ 8. An Illustration 

To give a concrete illustration of the deduction 
of the unconscious activity from conscious acts or 
words, I will cite the following case communicated 
to me by a lady. She was marketing and bought 
some damsons at the fruit store — a basket for sev- 
enty-five cents and other fruits amounting to a dol- 
lar and a half. She paid for them and left the 
store. After walking for a block or two she was 
seized with the idea that she had been overcharged 
twenty-five cents by the dealer for the damsons. 
Forgetting that they had been priced seventy-five 
cents, and now thinking that they were fifty cents, 
she wrote out the items on a piece of paper, took it 
back to the dealer and showed him the sum total, 
now a dollar and a quarter. 

Her manner of telling her story was so convinc- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 119 

ing that he looked probably only at the sum, took 
her word for it, and gave her back the quarter 
that she said was due her. The reason why she 
promptly forgot the real price of the damsons, sev- 
enty-five cents, will appear from what she next did. 
She went to another store and spent all the money 
she had in her purse for some other articles. If she 
had not had the extra quarter she took in from the 
fruit dealer, she would not have had enough to pay 
for the most important purchase of her marketing, 
something she very much wanted to have for lunch. 
After she went home, it suddenly flashed upon her 
that seventy-five cents was the right price for the 
damsons after all, and she was quite chagrined that 
she had unconsciously cheated the fruit dealer. 

This one incident would not reveal the uncon- 
scious motives underlying the forgetting of the real 
price of the fruit, but when thousands of other 
slips of memory have been examined from the point 
of view of the theory of the unconscious, it is 
quite evident that the lady's unconscious controlled 
the situation to the extent of making her forget 
the price. It also caused her to believe (because 
she unconsciously wished) that the damsons were 
fifty cents a basket, and it drove her to shave off 
the price off these, which she was going to turn into 
jam at considerable labour, and add it to the amount 
which without it would not have been sufficient to 
buy something else that she wanted very much. 

It is quite as if her unconscious had spoken to 
her in so many words, saying : " It would be nice, 



120 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

if these damsons were only fifty cents; so let us 
make believe they are, and persuade the dealer that 
he has overcharged us." This incident is the more 
remarkable because the lady was not consciously 
aware that she had not enough money in her purse 
to pay for what she wanted to buy at the second 
store. She was seized with the idea solely of the 
overcharge, while walking from the first store to the 
second, thus unconsciously cheating the first man in 
order to pay the second, without knowing either 
that she was cheating him or why she was. The 
reason must be quite evident to the reader by this 
time, but it occurred to the lady only after she had 
arrived home. 

The dominating wish in this episode was of the 
self-aggrandizement character and belonged to the 
enlargement of the objective self, which is seen in 
the tendency to acquire real things, and it caused 
a sudden oblivion of one very clearly conscious fact, 
and the emergence into consciousness of an utterly 
erroneous idea, with, however, such vividness and 
force that it made her stop, and prepare a written 
document, which was probably the most convinc- 
ing argument she could have used on the very pre- 
occupied fruit dealer. It made her retrace her 
steps, carry out the really ridiculous farce with the 
man, and enabled her to go home triumphantly 
with what she actually wanted more than she did 
the damsons. It made her write on her paper 
" Damsons .50 " and read it to herself as " Dam- 
sons seventy-five cents," just as it makes other peo- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 121 

pie see what is not there and not see what is there, 
errors that are constantly being made by every one 
all the time. Errare est humanum, but one never 
errs against the interests of the unconscious. 

As a reply to those who may say that sometimes 
mistakes are injurious or even fatal to the one who 
makes them, I would cite the statements of those 
physicians who have examined the mental condi- 
tions of people who fall and hurt themselves, or 
who make faulty actions of almost any kind. In 
almost all the cases of those misfortunes analysis 
has shown that there was an unconscious wish grat- 
ified in the end, not necessarily a wish to fall and 
be injured, but an unconscious wish to receive at 
least some of the favours and attentions claimed by 
and bestowed upon the unfortunate. 

§ 9. Accidents 

In a sense then there is no such thing as an acci- 
dent. Had the unconscious wish of all the persons 
concerned in the inspection of equipment, the actual 
running and observance of signals in the case of the 
train that breaks a wheel or a rail, or runs past a 
signal and collides with another train standing on 
the same track — had the unconscious wishes of all 
these persons been upon the same goal, the precau- 
tions against disaster would have been so numerous 
as to make disaster impossible. If the elevator 
which dropped fifteen stories and killed some and 
injured many others had been inspected the day 
before by a man whose unconscious wishes were all 



122 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

centred upon the safe transportation of passengers 
in elevators, the cable would not have snapped, 
because his unconscious wish would have made him 
examine it with the greatest care. And again if 
elevator accidents were much more common than 
they are, the unconscious wishes of a large number 
of people would put it into their heads to take 
concerted action in the matter and secure better 
inspection or heavier cables or more efficient safety 
stops. 

There is no doubt of the fact that many accidents 
attributed to carelessness are the result of the un- 
conscious wishes of one or more people that the 
accident would happen. Carelessness is but the 
absence of the conscious wish. Care means the 
presence of the wish or desire. 

There is also no doubt of the fact that to wish 
for a thing with all one's heart implies the con- 
currence of both conscious and unconscious wishes. 
To wish for success with one's entire subjective and 
objective ego is to wish for it consciously and un- 
consciously at the same time. The conscious wish 
may be for the ownership of a house in the country. 
If a man says to himself : " I wish I had a place in 
the country ! " and does not express himself further 
in word or act, we may be quite sure that uncon- 
sciously (that is, with the greater part of his per- 
sonality), he does not want a home in the country. 
In fact the conscious verbal expression of this wish 
is many times, though not always, a direct indica- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 123 

tion of the man's unconscious desire not to be both- 
ered with suburban or rural ownership. For, if he 
really did want it, ideas would continually occur 
to him showing him how he could take steps to get 
his house. The very fact that in reading his morn- 
ing newspaper his eye lights on an advertisement 
of such a house as he would like to own, and in an- 
other column happens to notice that some stock he 
owns has gone up a few points, — the mere fact that 
a casual perusal of a newspaper brings out these 
two points shows at once that in two instants of his 
conscious thinking he has been almost completely 
controlled by his unconscious wish for a house in 
the country. It shows that there are at least two 
sections of his unconscious mind that are ready to 
steer into the focus of attention whatever factors 
they can toward the purchase. 

§ 10. Another Illustration 

A professional man of an improvident nature 
moved from a flat in a large city to furnished rooms 
in a suburb, where he proposed to live for an in- 
definite time, meanwhile keeping his eye open for 
a good chance to rent a house, where his wife and 
child of three could have more wholesome surround- 
ings. The unconscious wish to buy was very slight, 
though he told his friends that he was going to 
have a house in the country. Consciously he 
thought he wanted only to rent, as he had been un- 
fortunate in previous real estate holdings in the 



124 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

same suburb, and at this time he was not only 
without funds but was actually considerably in 
debt. 

But he found when looking about the town that 
rents were exorbitant for undesirable places and 
that really very few houses were for rent, while 
almost every third house in town was for sale at 
an extremely high price. His furnished rooms on 
the other hand cost him more than he had paid 
for his flat in the city. His wife very much dis- 
liked the rooms and the people from whom he 
rented them. 

Consciously, therefore, his situation was such as 
to make him see the desirability of owning a house, 
but he could not seem to get any ideas as to how 
to proceed about financing it. Now the born finan- 
cier can interest the capital of other men and can 
amass a fortune out of nothing. Ideas of manipu- 
lations come to his mind in large numbers unbid- 
den and nothing escapes him. He does not think 
out his schemes consciously only, but they come into 
his head fully formed and the means of carrying 
them out have been observed by him perhaps years 
before, and the memories stored in his mind ready 
for the suitable occasion. 

Not so, however, with the improvident profes- 
sional man in question. He was deeply absorbed 
in collecting words for a special dictionary of trade 
terms. It did not occur to him to examine the real 
estate market thoroughly. It did occur to him to 
add to his collection of terms. His wife on the 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 125 

other hand studied the advertisements in the local 
paper and upbraided him constantly for his lack 
of enthusiasm on the house idea. Her persistence 
drove him to a local bank president for advice as 
to how to raise funds. This man told him he ought 
to wait two or three years before buying a house 
as the market was at top prices and in that time 
there would be a decline. This he took for gospel 
truth. He would not have accepted it, if it had not 
coincided with his unconscious wish, which was 
predominantly against ownership. What occurred 
to his mind about owning a house was the thought 
not only of having to run his own furnace, which 
he would have to do in a rented place, but also of 
taking care of the outside of the house, painting 
it, replacing gutters and leaders, mowing the lawn, 
etc., all of which made the ownership idea unaccept- 
able to a physically lazy man. In reality he did not 
care except superficially and verbally about his 
wife's discomforts in the furnished rooms. He was 
not in them over much. Unconsciously then the 
situation was very unpropitious for his taking any 
very efficient measures for getting a house. Stung 
by his wife's continued railing he went and inter- 
viewed some rich friends and acquaintances, un- 
consciously picking out those who, as he should 
have known, were most unlikely to help him. 

Besides the high cost of renting and the fewness 
of the houses to be rented, to which I have referred, 
another factor entered into the situation. On 
walking through a pleasant street on the outskirts 



126 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

of the suburb he and his wife came to a new, still 
unoccupied but very small and perfectly equipped 
house. By the merest chance the door happened 
to be unlocked and they walked in and saw it with 
the greatest interest. It had every modern con- 
venience and was in all respects a most desirable 
dwelling. His wife mentally placed their furni- 
ture, then in storage, in the places which the pieces 
would occupy if they owned the house. The wife 
said : " This would be our room, and this would be 
Theresa's and this little one I could have for my 
sewing room." To which he replied : " Yes, my 
dear, how nice." His own unconscious wishes were 
not even then much enlisted, for when they re- 
turned that afternoon to their furnished rooms, he 
said : " That house is too small, too far from the 
centre of the town, too lonely, you would never 
be content there yourself. You would be afraid to 
stay there with Theresa all night alone. Besides 
I could not buy it. The man wants too much 
equity." 

Thus things went along for a month until sum- 
mer time. The first of July came. The husband 
picked out a few more impossible acquaintances and 
told them his plan, how he would borrow the money 
from them and pay them back so much every year, 
give them 7 per cent, on their money and the deed 
to the house until he had paid back what he bor- 
rowed. He went to the wrong people, even to a 
couple of real estate agents who admitted that they 
had once done that sort of thing but frankly said 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 127 

that now that they had made so much money they 
did not have to take this means of increasing their 
sales. Manifestly his unconscious was not yet 
wishing to own a house. 

The unconscious situation, however, unex- 
pectedly changed. It occurred to him that he did 
not himself like the furnished rooms. They were 
dark, north rooms. He planned to go away for the 
summer and he suddenly realized that he would 
have no chance while away, to do anything at all 
about a home, that he would at the end of the sum- 
mer return to his professional work without either 
a city flat or a suburban house and be literally 
homeless. He recalled vividly the difficulty he had 
had in finding even these undesirable rooms, and — 
then he went one day to an old school friend of his 
whom he had not seen in 25 years, laid before this 
man his scheme of repayment in instalments. His 
friend said : " Surely, old man, any time you wish, 
any amount you want, and I don't have to sell any 
securities to get the cash ready either." Thus did 
the improvident professional man's unconscious ex- 
ecute a right-about face, and immediately suggest 
the names of several old friends, the first one of 
whom most gladly and graciously acceded to the 
proposition which he had presented in the same 
way to a dozen other persons. 

The proverb " Where there's a will there's a 
way " is cryptic. To be translated into modern 
analytical psychological terms it should read : " If 
the unconscious wish is directed to a certain object, 



128 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

a multitude of ideas about means of acquiring that 
object will spontaneously present themselves to 
consciousness." But I will admit that the brief 
and alliterative original is easier to remember than 
the translation into psychological language. 

The improvident professional man of this story 
woke up with extraordinary suddenness to the 
actual situation that was encompassing him. Ab- 
sorbed in his dictionary dream, he did not realize, 
until almost the day of leaving the suburb for his 
summer vacation, that he would be in a very em- 
barrassing position when he returned in the fall. 
His realization of his situation, however, was ac- 
companied by the unconscious mental activity be- 
coming centred about the one idea of owning the 
little house in which his wife had imagined their 
chairs and tables as standing, and he went straight 
to the right man, borrowed the necessary money 
and bought that house with it. Since that time he 
has realized too that it has been for him a money 
saving scheme, for at the end of a few years he not 
only paid back his friend but had become thrifty 
himself instead of improvident. 

But there was an unconscious reason why this 
man was improvident. Consciously he would have 
told any one that of course he wanted to have money 
and prosper in a financial way. Who wouldn't? 
But unconsciously he was not desirous of having 
money for he was unhappily married. He did not 
really want his wife to have luxuries, and he knew 
that if he had money she would demand and he 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 129 

would have to give her whatever luxuries she 
wanted. He was not one of those men who go 
ahead and make money and never let their wives 
know how much they earn or gain in speculation. 
So that although he inherited some, it was soon 
dissipated, after which they lived a hand to mouth 
existence, the man always protesting that he 
couldn't earn enough, which meant he didn't want 
to, the wife always telling him he was a brilliant 
man and could earn all he wanted if he only would. 
They were both right. He could not because he 
did not unconsciously wish to. He could earn all 
he wanted, because he did earn all he unconsciously 
wanted, and got most of his satisfactions from the 
notably efficient and economical way his wife man- 
aged the home, bought an automobile on the in- 
stalment plan and in a truly marvellous way made 
a really small amount of money perform almost a 
miracle in providing creature comforts and even 
luxuries. 

These two illustrations of the lady and the dam- 
sons and the improvident professional man clearly 
show the objective facts from which are deduced 
the unconscious wishes in both personalities, but 
of course in a very small section of the personal- 
ities. There is no doubt at all that the unconscious 
wishes of every person are the only explanation of 
the otherwise inexplicable in human conduct. We 
all do things every day which are from the con- 
scious point of view irrational. Judged by really 
conscious logical standards these acts are irritat- 



130 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ing in their lack of consecutiveness and rational 
purpose. We see them in the whims of childhood, 
the caprices of youth, the prejudices of middle age 
and the crotchets of senility. 

§ 11. Magnification 

The magnification of his subjective ego if carried 
to its limit makes the individual believe he is, or is 
on a par with, divinity. To be omnipercipient is 
almost if not quite equivalent to being omniscient 
and omnipotent. If I could, I would look in a 
crystal in my home in New York and see some rob- 
bery being committed, in any place whatever, say 
Chicago. With my hyperesthetic vision I would 
follow the robber and note what he did with his 
loot, and then where he betook himself. I would 
arrange by telephone for his immediate apprehen- 
sion and the recovery of the stolen property. I 
would receive the reward offered for both, and the 
next night I would do the same thing. I could 
easily make from one to ^\e thousand dollars a day 
doing that. I would be consulted by all the great 
detectives and secret service men. I would buy a 
larger and more perfect crystal if that had any- 
thing to do with it. I would continue, year after 
year, until either robbery would be manifestly 
absurd, because every act would be instantly de- 
tected by my all-seeing eye, or my methods and 
success would be duplicated by any other person or 
persons interested in thus subjectively magnifying 
their own ego, when there would be so many men 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 131 

and women capable of doing the* same thing that 
even the thought of attempting any crime what- 
ever would at once appear ridiculous, and crime 
would vanish from the face of the earth. With 
enough people able thus, through crystals, to see 
what any one they wished to spy on was doing, 
there would soon be few people who would harbour 
any dishonest thoughts at all for fear of being 
branded as potential criminals and universally boy- 
cotted. Furthermore the world would consist of 
demigod crystal gazers and the rest of the people 
who would live in fear if not reverence of these. 
Who would not belong to the demigod class? But 
if crystal gazing and telepathy were scientific facts 
and not merely beliefs inspired by unconscious 
wishes for subjective ego magnification, almost any 
one having an introspective, or introversional dis- 
position would be able to magnify his vision to the 
point of clairvoyance, and do what I have said 
above that I would do. 

If I could, I would lie on my sofa in my den in 
my house in New York City, would have my stenog- 
rapher take down the ramblings of my mind, and 
if these could be attuned to the telepathic waves 
emanating from some passion-shaken wretch I 
would see him in my vision as he started from some 
suburban barn with a horse and red wagon loaded 
with dynamite and window weights sawed into 
slugs by the oxyacetylene torch, I would, as I lay 
in a trance, utter these things into words. My 
secretary, also present while my stenographer was 



132 MANS UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

recording my utterances, would at once call up the 
police, have the wagon driven into the middle of a 
large vacant space, or the machinery of the time 
clock stopped and thirty lives and four hundred 
injuries in Wall Street would be saved. I would 
let my mind ramble on in my trance state in the 
presence of my stenographer and my secretary and 
avert calamity after calamity. I would deteet 
every " red " thought in the minds of every Bol- 
shevist and Anarchist on the eve of every one of 
their senseless perpetrations; or I would start a 
glass and explosion insurance company of my own 
and become a millionaire in a few weeks. 

If I could, I would lie reposefully in the evening 
quiet of my darkened study, in the house in New 
York, and get telepathic communications from all 
who were taking unjust and unreasonable profits 
from the storage and sale of commodities. I would, 
if I could be that sort of medium, entrance myself 
every night and my secretary would the next morn- 
ing publish a list of all the persons who were ex- 
torting money by taking advantage of the ignorance 
and lack of self-control of their fellows. 

If I could have done so, I would have averted the 
Titanic disaster, given warning of earthquakes and 
volcanic eruptions and saved innumerable lives. I 
would have averted the world war. I would have 
enlisted the activities of mankind in much needed 
constructive work, both moral and material. If I 
could have done these things, there are thousands 
of other men and women with just as good feelings 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 133 

for humanity who could have done them as well as 
I. Therefore they could not have been done, or 
they would have been done. 

'Except, that were I as omniscient as all that, I 
should probably have let the whole thing go on as it 
did, earthquakes, eruptions both volcanic and social 
and everything else. 

Furthermore, if I could, I would communicate 
with the spirits of the departed, particularly with 
my two best college friends, H.M.H. and G.N.O., 
who have departed before me and I would have con- 
tinued our discourses on God, Freedom and Im- 
mortality. I would have done it frequently. I 
would have sent my whole family to the movies for 
at least one evening every week in order to learn 
from my two absent friends, who told me everything 
in their lives, without the least reserve, just how 
they were passing the time now and what they were 
thinking about; for their thoughts were more in- 
teresting to me than those of any people I have 
ever met since. If I could do this, so could others ; 
and no movies or any other form of public enter- 
tainment would be necessary or possible, for the 
tales they would tell would surpass in interest any- 
thing that one could pay money to see. 

If I could do this thing and it were a scientific 
fact, like telegraphy and telephony and gramophony 
or any other thing, anybody could do it. When 
radium was made by Curie, his description of his 
process enabled any other chemist having the same 
materials to make the same product. When Jenner 



134 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

told others how to vaccinate, any physician conld 
do the same. When serum therapy was discovered, 
every physician was in a position to use it. When 
telepathy is scientifically proved, all I have said 
that I would do, if I could, will be possible for me 
and for any other psychologist as soon as he reads 
the description of the proper method. It has not 
yet been scientifically discovered. I infer that lack 
because of the fact that the method has not been 
described. This is not saying that it will not be 
discovered some day. I am not attempting a nega- 
tive proof, which is a very unwise thing to do. I 
am merely stating what would have to be possible 
before telepathy would rightly be regarded as sci- 
entifically established. 

§ 12. Limit on Size 

However, there is no manner of doubt that the 
idea of telepathy is very firmly established, but that 
is quite another thing. It not only is established 
but it always has been established in the human 
mind simply as a result of the above-stated prin- 
ciple of the universal unconscious desire for the 
magnification of the individual subjective ego. In 
the preceding paragraphs I have shown the way in 
which the ego would be magnified, first the sub- 
jective, by extension of ability to perceive, and then 
the objective ego by the amassing of material 
wealth. 

It is evident that if the unconscious could have 
its crassest vegetative wish fulfilled, it would be by 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN UKGE 135 

simple growing of the individual body. We can but 
suppose that, if the impulse which drives on the tis- 
sues of the animal body could be called a wish, that 
the wish of any particular organ would be for mere 
proliferation of cells in such a way that the tissue 
of the organ would grow so large as to weigh down 
the rest of the body with its increased ponderosity, 
and that it is only the impossibility thus created 
of the rest of the body moving it and contributing to 
its development which operates as a check. As we 
are all of us, animals and humans alike, organisms 
that require a subjection of each part to every other 
part of the individual, the mere proliferation of 
cells in any one part, and its consequent dispro- 
portionate growth would destroy the balance of the 
whole, and render it incapable in the struggle for 
existence. But we must suppose that the uncon- 
scious wish for physical enlargement of any part 
of the animal body must inhere in that part or in 
its component elements; and we can therefore 
easily see that the unconscious wish for merely 
vegetative growth is one of the most fundamental 
of unconscious wishes, upspringing eternal in the 
animal system, and, as is always the case, forced 
to take a substitute aggrandizement for the original 
merely material one. 

Thus the enlargement of the objective ego is a 
substitute for that of the subjective. The amass- 
ing of material wealth, which is symbolic power, is 
a substitute for the generally unattainable physical 
predominance, attaining which the unconscious 



136 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

would cease to issue to the vegetative life any im- 
pulses to grow in actual size. But the average hu- 
man is not of dominating corporeal size and in or- 
der to satisfy vicariously the unconscious wish to 
be so, he has to gather around him things that can 
be called by his name. 

§ 13. Fission and Fusion 

The significant difference between animal and 
higher vegetable life on the one hand and all lower 
forms of life on the other is the difference between 
reproduction by fission 1 and reproduction by fu- 
sion. In the truly sexual reproduction, a new in- 
dividual is initiated by the fusion of two cells, 
while his growth and development is carried on 
solely by fission. The two original cells by their 
union form one cell which is the beginning of him 
as an individual, a single celled organism like other 
single celled organisms with, however, the essential 
difference that this one, formed by the fusion of 
two, does not split into two cells homogeneous in 
all their qualities but into two which differ in that 
they subsequently develop into two different parts 
of a whole. In the true fission reproduction any 
cell splits into two cells which are homogeneous in 
all qualities and these into four similar ones, these 
into eight and so on. Now when the individual 
that is the result of fusion of two cells, has split 
into two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 
2048, etc., cells, all these cells appear to have dif- 

1 Karyokineais. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 137 

ferent potentialities for producing different parts 
of the organism constituting the individual until 
at any rate the several parts reach their maximum 
of growth. 

What it is that prevents this maximum from 
being much larger than it actually is, is not clear, 
but there would have to be an end to it for the fol- 
lowing reason. The individuals composing any 
species can not reproduce other individuals except 
by means of the fusion of the male cell and the 
female cell, the zoosperm and the ovum. In order 
to attain the greatest possible cross fertilization, 
the males and females must be of a more or less 
average size (or an inordinately large male would 
not fertilize but kill a small female, and a small 
male could not fertilize an inordinately large fe- 
male) . But if it happened that a male and female 
went on growing to such size that they were ten 
times the size of the average and they met and 
reproduced their kind, the huge children of that 
union would have no others except their own broth- 
ers and sisters with which to mate, and would there- 
fore suffer the fate of extreme inbreeding which is 
eventual extinction. 

So we may say that it is the necessity of fusional 
reproduction that puts an end to individual cor- 
poreal aggrandizement. The proliferation of cells 
by fission is stopped for the sole purpose of per- 
mitting reproduction by fusion. The male and fe- 
male cells in the animal body thus have a power of 
veto over the continuous enlargement of the groups 



138 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

of other cells. How this is effected is not known. 
We can only see that it must be so. Then, when 
the growth of the individual male and female has 
reached a point which might be called the specific 
point, the growth in mere size automatically stops 
and the impulse is no longer for growth but towards 
fusion. 

In the adult animal, from the time of his reach- 
ing adulthood until the time of his involution or 
gradual disintegration all the impulses springing 
from the interaction of all the parts of his body are 
toward the goal of the fusional reproduction not of 
himself but of other individuals. Normally he 
stops desiring increase of size as an individual 
while his separate organs may in themselves still 
have the unconscious impulse to continue to in- 
crease their own size. 

§ 14. Unconsciousness as Omnipercipient 

The unconscious is constantly receiving impres- 
sions from the external world while consciousness 
is not. This does not merely mean that we hear 
when we are asleep, but even when most awake we 
may be consciously absorbed by sounds and quite 
unaware of multitudes of sights that pass before 
our eyes. We are visually asleep, so to speak, while 
acoustically awake. Or, vice versa, we may be 
asleep to sounds while awake to sights. Further- 
more, we are continuously asleep now to some, now 
to others of the impressions coming through the 
various avenues of sensation. But the unconscious 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN UKGE 139 

is never asleep to any of them and, in addition, has 
avenues of sense to which the conscious life has 
never been awakened and, as it is a logical machine, 
it is constantly making deductions and other in- 
ferences about the factors of the environment. 1 

For example, in a human supposedly, for argu- 
ment's sake, capable of a growth in perfectly sym- 
metrical proportion to a size ten times greater than 
normal we may imagine that when he has grown 
10 per cent, greater than the average, his uncon- 
scious, to speak figuratively, calls a halt on this 
mere growth-for-size business, and says to the vari- 
ous tissues and organs making him up : " Look here, 
this increase has got to stop. If you go on increas- 
ing you will not be able to get a single girl to marry 
you. You'll never find one big enough for you. 
Your individual organs and tissues are only parts 
of a machine that is made for reproducing your 
own kind. You want your own peculiar traits of 
character perpetuated in offspring. You can't 
yourself live for ever. Your only immortality is 
in your children and grandchildren and theirs. 
If you'll have the sense to stop growing before you 
collapse for sheer weight you'll have a chance to 
live for ever in your offspring." Now the uncon- 
scious which has figuratively said all that is dom- 
inated by the will to live, not a will merely to grow, 
and proceeds to interest the organism as a whole 
in some likely female. And the organism consents 
to stop growing and marry so it can live. If it 

i See Wilfrid Lay: The Child's Unconscious Mind, page 19. 



140 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

went on growing merely, it would surely die not 
only individually but racially. 

But the unconscious that sees all that the eye 
sees, which is more than consciousness sees, that 
hears all that comes into the ear, which is more 
sounds than the conscious ego is aware of, the un- 
conscious that thinks all day and all night, whether 
or not conscious thinking goes on, realizes the dis- 
proportion of mere growth very much above the 
average, and stops it for its own purposes of repro- 
duction by fusion which is its only means of ag- 
grandizement and is independent of the enlarge- 
ment of the several organs and tissues severally, 
and is the dominating impulse in all animal life. 

All that I have said about the limiting of growth 
of the animal body being solely for the purposes of 
fusional reproduction which is the only aggrandize- 
ment directly sought by the unconscious applies, 
mutatis mutandis, to the aggrandizement of the ego 
whether subjective or objective. There is a pur- 
pose in limiting the enlargement either of our real 
estate or our thoughts, because such enlargement 
unfits us for the most wholesome intercourse, social, 
spiritual, and intellectual, with our fellow-men. 
There is an analogous fusional reproduction of so- 
cial relations which would be prevented by the un- 
limited mental growth of any individual. Geniuses 
are lonely and animals are sociable, therefore the 
genius is an abnormal animal. 

What I have said about the unconscious and its 
superiority over consciousness in the matter of 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 141 

sheer capacity of perception will explain my atti- 
ture toward the so-called facts of spiritism. My 
thesis is that the medium is one who becomes con- 
sciously aware of more than does the average man 
and woman of what has been previously uncon- 
sciously perceived by him. 

It makes no difference what his distinctive per- 
formance is — going into a trance and saying 
things, or writing without knowing what he is writ- 
ing, or seeing visual images in a crystal sphere. 
It is his peculiarity that makes him the object of 
reverence and thereby increases his subjective ego. 

And, as I have said in another place, the motives 
for becoming a medium are the unconscious ones of 
self-aggrandizement. If we could all become me- 
diums, and mediumship had no premium on it, some 
other end would be sought. The medium has found 
the way to attract to himself the greatest amount 
possible, for him, of human hero worship and mate- 
rial gain, both of which are increases in his ego. 

§ 15. The Medium as Unconscious 

It is quite evident that the innumerable impres- 
sions received not by consciousness, but by the un- 
conscious during twenty-five years, say, of constant 
impressionability will neither be remembered by the 
conscious ego nor recognized at once if they should 
be remembered. But it should not be overlooked by 
the student of psychological subjects that while an 
experience may never be recalled and recognized as 
an experience of one's own life, scientific investi- 



142 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

gation of the most rigorous character has shown 
that such experiences may be, and sometimes are, 
revived and recognized under the peculiar tech- 
nique of psychoanalysis, after the lapse of as much 
as thirty years. Thus Ludwig Frank of Zurich has 
revived in his patients of 35 years memories of 
scenes and incidents that had occurred when they 
were 5 years old. 

Now the medium of 30-40 years old with even 
thirty years of impressions collected as a totality 
in his unlimited unconscious storehouse is, accord- 
ing to the theory of probabilities, going to have a 
rather large amount of human experience that will 
be quite similar to that of almost any one else, and 
his utterances, if they can be twisted and inter- 
preted 1 to apply to the experiences of other people 
are quite likely to seem more remarkable than mere 
coincidences of thought, but probability alone 
would show that in all likelihood they are not. 

In short, my thesis is that the verbal utterances 
of mediums are but the fortuitous emergence into 
the mediums' consciousness, or in some cases into 
the consciousness not of the medium but of those 
who listen to him while he is in his trance, the 
emergence into consciousness of experiences which 
have for years or decades lain buried in the me- 
diums' own unconscious, and these utterances are 
not the result of telepathic communication from the 
living or from the spirits of the dead. 

i It is observed in Chapter I, sec. 15, that not so very much 
twisting is necessary to change the fundamental symbols of un- 
conscious thought into each other. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 143 

Modern psychology is throwing more and more 
light on the unconscious and increasing the possi- 
bility of resuscitating in the individual memories 
which have lain dormant in him for years, and the 
results achieved show that there is in the content 
of the mediumistic messages a great similarity to 
that of the ordinary unconscious of the average man 
and woman. 

§ 16. Unconscious Wishes 

The cumulative effect of the unconscious wishes 
which keep pushing up from subliminal depths of 
the seon-old libido handed down to us from the 
dawn of the world is such that if our feeling of 
reality is not exceedingly normal and vigorous, if 
not only the evidence of all our twenty odd senses 
but also our knowledge of the significance of the re- 
lations of things in the external world is weakened 
for us to more than an average degree, we succumb 
to the pressure of the wishes from within and are 
forced to believe what we know is not so. The poor 
fellow in the asylum, hounded for years with an 
unconscious sense of inferiority, a failure in his 
relations with all his social environment is finally 
forced to believe that he is the most powerful man 
in the world, Napoleon, and that all the actual hap- 
penings about him are ruses, deceits, and illusions. 
Strengthened by the constancy of his disappoint- 
ments, his wishes combine and incorporate them- 
selves, and completely dominate and control his 
feeling of reality. " It must be so, Plato, thou rea- 



144 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

sonest well. Else whence this pleasing hope, this 
fond desire, this longing after immortality? " 

The fate of the unconscious wish in the history 
of the human individual in the modern complicated 
social fabric is one of gradual repression begin- 
ning in the earliest infancy and continued with in- 
creasing force as the years go by. The funda- 
mental unconscious wish for the magnification of 
the ego receives blow after blow and finally being 
unable to issue in this or that specific act which 
would increase some power of the individual at the 
same time decreasing or annihilating the same or a 
similar power of some other, the unconscious wish 
develops outward but in a concealed manner adopt- 
ing the guise of something different. Yet it is the 
same wish. 

The ancient Greeks represented in various poet- 
ical myths the frustration of this wish of man's to 
be too great for the environment, in stories which 
frequently had for their point the folly of aping 
the greatness of the gods. Thus Arachne, the skil- 
ful spinner, challenged Artemis, and for her pride 
was turned into a spider. Niobe's ego was so mag- 
nified by her numerous and beautiful children, that 
Apollo shot them all with his terrible bow, and 
Salmoneus, who aspired to make a thundering noise 
and flashing light in rivalry of Jupiter's lightning, 
was appropriately punished for his ambitions to be- 
come expansive in flash and detonation. 

The unconscious wish of the little child for mere 
extension of ego in all directions is natural and 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AS AN URGE 145 

transparent and up to a certain age amusing. But 
the mother-spoiled child is a terrible thing and 
risks annihilation at the hands of the other mem- 
bers of his environment. Generally, however, the 
great / am of this early age begins to be gradually 
beaten into the average mould, and less ostenta- 
tiously to force his mere undraped, unvarnished 
ego into the view of other people. He begins very 
early to transform his mere expansivity into a dis- 
semination of virtuous actions, virtuous in that 
they are of some service to other people. Little 
children will be very helpful about the house but it 
is quite evident that the help element of their ac- 
tions affords them less satisfaction than the spread 
of their own activity over many objects, most of 
their good deeds being summed up for them in their 
ecstatic exclamation : " You see what / did do ! " 
Thus, however, is made the beginning of the subli- 
mation of the unconscious wish for self-aggrandize- 
ment — the transmutation of their expanding ego 
into the real things of their environment — the 
sublimation of the baser metal of their self-wishes 
into the gold of social acts. But the outward drive 
from within is the same unconscious wish, no mat- 
ter what the actual concrete result in word or deed. 
It is the same stream that drives the mill, whether 
electric light or power, or brass or flour is the end- 
result. 

From this it is most natural to infer that what- 
ever is done by the individual whether it be crime 
or benefaction, money hoarding or altruism is quite 



146 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

impartially to be attributed to the driving power 
of the unconscious wish. How it happens to lead 
one person to crime and another to the deeds of a 
good Samaritan is a matter of the individual his- 
tory of the psyche. It takes as much libido to com- 
mit a murder as to be the parent of a child. It 
takes as much human energy to get out a thou- 
sand page report of the sittings of a medium as to 
prepare for publication the results of any scientific 
investigation. If as much energy as has been de- 
voted to the study of dowsing, levitation, lekanom- 
ancy, telepathy, materialization and repercussion, 
had been used in more social and less abnormal di- 
rections we might have been better able to use and 
control the emotions of mankind. 

As chemistry evolved from alchemy and astron- 
omy from astrology, and certain branches of physi- 
ological psychology from phrenology, through the 
gradual shift from the emphasis on the wish, e. g., 
to produce gold from lead, to the emphasis on the 
observed relations between actual things, what was 
the thing made of, e. g., in other words from the 
purely pain-pleasure habit of thought to the reality 
principle in directed thinking, 1 so there may evolve 
from the psychical research of the present day a 
practical result for psychology. But we should not 
deceive ourselves into thinking that it has already 
come to pass or that we have knowledge where we 
only feel belief. 

i See Chap. VI, sec. 16. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MECHANISMS 

Having now given enough illustrations to show 
the unconscious factor in operation in quite a num- 
ber of happenings of ordinary life, I shall have to 
proceed to the so-called mechanisms or observed 
tendencies in the unconscious mental activity. 
Based on the feelings of sameness or familiarity 
and reinforced by the errant feeling of reality, the 
activities of the mind going on constantly below 
the threshold of consciousness naturally proceed 
according to the principle of identification. 

This habit of unconscious mind results in many 
things in the objective world being felt to be the 
same as, or to have qualities similar to, the ego. If 
an impression received from an external stimulus is 
felt to be that of something similar to the ego, the 
identification may be said, by a figure of speech, to 
be centripetal. Indeed, psychoanalysts speak of it 
as introjection. If, on the other hand, an idea 
originating in the individual's mind is attributed 
as a true predicate of some external thing this cen- 
trifugal process is called projection. 

§ 1. Association 

The association of mental activities includes that 
of impressions with impressions, of impressions 
with images and of images with images. Impres- 

147 



148 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

sions are associated with impressions according to 
their contiguity in time or space. External impres- 
sions are associated with internal impressions 
through the reflex arc. When an infant's open eyes 
are confronted with a bright light, he has the ex- 
ternal impression of the light, also the external im- 
pression of his eyes closing, also the internal im- 
pression of discomfort. Images are associated 
with impressions according to the same law of con- 
tiguity in time or space, and with each other they 
are associated by the feeling of sameness, another 
internal sensation. Whether there are any innate 
tendencies to associate internal impressions with 
external ones depends largely on what internal im- 
pressions are included. If we consider a natural 
reaction of dizziness as the internal impression as- 
sociated with visual motion of a certain type, it 
seems that we must say that some internal impres- 
sions are regularly associated with external ones. 
Those that we have observed to be uniformly thus 
linked, have been called reactions on reflexes. The 
others have been called conditioned reflexes. The 
internal impressions called emotions then fall under 
the conditioned reflexes. That is, they are ac- 
quired, the others being innate or hereditary. 

Of the acquired or conditioned reflexes or asso- 
ciations of mental activities, those that are acquired 
in the conventional manner, have no term that cor- 
responds to the unconventionally acquired ones 
which are called displacements. 

There is a class of what one might call centripetal 



THE MECHANISMS 149 

associations of mental activities in which the ex- 
ternal stimulus becomes more intimately associated 
with the internal impression contiguous to it, as in 
the case of the child later to be mentioned who fears 
the block on a street where a dog barked at him. 
These associations of mental activities (e. g., the 
sight of the block in question and the internal im- 
pression called fear) constitute a linkage com- 
paratively unusual, and result in the image of the 
place having, for a time at least, persistently at- 
tached to it an emotion practically disadvantageous, 
that is, not helping the individual in his adaption 
to his environment. This type of association of 
mental activity is called introjection because the 
stimulus is regarded as introjected or, as it were, 
forcibly made to enter the minds of some persons, 
to an extent, or with a uniformity, not observed in 
others. If the persistence of this association of 
fear with a place for example is excessive, the con- 
dition is called abnormal, though it should not be 
understood that abnormal implies violation of any 
of nature's laws, the most extravagant cases of in- 
trojection being as much subject to the law of cause 
and effect as is any other association of mental ac- 
tivities. 

If, however, an internal impression, for example, 
a sense of guilt, is associated with another person ; 
if I am guilty and I believe that some other per- 
son knows of my guilt, this belief constitutes an 
association of a, so to speak, centrifugal nature and 
is called projection. The internal sensation or im- 



150 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

pression of the guilt is projected upon the other 
person, not in the sense that he is guilty ; but in the 
sense that I attribute to him, without due cause, 
the knowledge I myself have of my own guilt. 

It is to be observed that here too the association 
of mental activities called projection should be 
called abnormal only in the sense of being exces- 
sive as compared with similar projections in aver- 
age people and in no way abnormal in the sense of 
contrary to Nature's laws. Both introjection and 
projection are universal with all people up to a 
certain degree varying for different circumstances. 
Thus the overvaluation of the object of love is a 
universal projection. 

It may be stated that both these associations, in- 
trojection and projection, are cases of identifica- 
tion, one centripetal, where the stimulus is identi- 
fied with the associated internal impression, the 
other centrifugal, where the external stimulus is 
identified with the image or internal sensation 
though it is neither the one nor the other. 

There is a distinction too between the identifica- 
tion on the one hand of an external with an internal 
activity such as that just mentioned, an identifica- 
tion which is called subjective (because something 
external is associated with something internal) ; 
and on the other hand the identification of two ex- 
ternal things. This second type, the external 
identification, is called transference, its classical 
illustration being the identification of teacher, 
clergyman, lawyer, physician, car conductor, or 



THE MECHANISMS 151 

cicerone of any kind with the imago of the early 
representative of all knowledge, power and author- 
ity, the father. 

In all associations of mental activities we have 
integrations of the things associated, the two or 
more mental activities associated tending to become 
unities in the sense of belonging to each other and, 
as it were, each constituting a part of a whole. 
Thus the impressions and images, very many in 
number, which constitute the infant's idea of its 
mother are integrated into what has been called 
the mother imago, an integration which tends to 
persist unchanged, in the unconscious, and in some 
individuals to retain its integrity for many years. 

If the integrations are ordinary, average, and 
practically universal in the social group, they be- 
long to the class I mentioned above as nameless, 
but which I might, on the analogy of their op- 
posites, call placements. If they are excessive, per- 
sistent over more than the average time, and pecul- 
iar or eccentric they are called displacements. 

§ 2. Humans Subject to Natural Law 

If we regard all mental states and activities as 
taking place according to laws which are valid for 
those mental conditions and for ourselves in so far 
as we are those mental states and activities, and 
equally valid for all human and animal mental 
powers alike, we shall have to admit that we or any 
of us cannot change those laws capriciously even 
though we may be able to imagine them changed. 



152 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

It is perfectly possible to conceive the opposite of 
everything that exists. 

We, on the contrary, are the phenomena of those 
laws, the illustrations of those principles. We are 
the data from which those general laws have been 
discovered, we and animals and plants and stones ; 
and it requires a very forceful argument to prove 
that these modes of mental action are different from 
the modes of action and from the conditions of the 
material universe. Psychical research is striving 
to prove that the laws of the material universe are 
not the same as those of the world of mind and 
spirit and this without adequately showing what is 
the relation of mind or spirit to matter, and even 
incidentally what mind or spirit really is. For it 
cannot be defined apart from matter, in combina- 
tion with which alone w 7 e know what we do of 
" spirit." The psychical researchers are present- 
ing us with a concept which they call spirit, with- 
out being able to describe it in terms of matter, 
because everything they say it can do that matter 
cannot do, is contrary to the observed law r s of mat- 
ter, and everything that they offer as a descrip- 
tion of it must be made necessarily in material 
terms. " Here," say they, " is an insect that can- 
not fly, it has no wings; that cannot walk, it has 
no legs ; that cannot swim, it has no fins ; that can- 
not reproduce sexually, it has no ova; that multi- 
plies by growing twice as large as it was and then 
breaking in two in the middle." This is a very in- 
teresting insect, but it is so lacking in traits that 



THE MECHANISMS 153 

we like to attribute to insects that it is almost if not 
quite impossible for us to call it an insect. We 
really could not call it so, scientifically. 

§ 3. Personality 

Similarly the personality, evidence of which is 
offered as existing somewhere after the body is dis- 
integrated which we knew as the outward expres- 
sion of the spirit or character of the person we 
called, e. g., Betsy Binn. We cannot hear her voice 
or touch her hand or recognize any of her modes of 
thought, positively, though there may be analogies 
between what the medium says and writes and what 
Betsy Binn used to say and do. But these analo- 
gies are not greater than between any two people 
of equal cultivation, and if the medium even in her 
waking state, should say to us: "I'll act Betsy 
Binn for you; I'll be your real old Betsy," she 
might if she lived with us long enough learn ex- 
actly how we liked our eggs done, and our house 
run in general and we could feel quite content with 
the medium Mrs. T. or Mrs. P., for if she tried very 
earnestly she might even out-Betsy our old Binn, 
and it would be " Bless thee, Betsy ; thou'rt trans- 
lated ! " But while she might really do better than 
our old cook, we should be eyed askance if we wrote 
a brochure in scientific language purporting to 
prove that the essence of Betsy Binn had added it- 
self to the essence of our present cook Mrs. T., and 
had given us unmistakable evidence of being no 
other than Betsy herself reincarnated in the now 



154 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

active president of our kitchen. Some one might 
ask us what we thought was the scientific status of 
a body with two souls, when we were not sure of 
the exact relation of any given body to even one 
soul. 

Multiple personality would be the answer of 
course. But would not almost any one if studied 
with the greatest care, and with the sole aim of 
discovering at least two personalities in his mind- 
body, would not almost any one be found to have 
at least two such well-defined personalities " in 
him " if enough care were spent in the actual work 
of definition. Every separate one of the " step- 
ping stones of our dead selves," the layer after 
layer of our lives that has sunk into oblivion can, 
if enough analytical research is devoted to it, be 
isolated out and be called a separate personality, 
so that each one of us has as many personalities 
in storage so to speak, as he has had epochs or 
periods or episodes in his past life. A man lives 
his youth in England as a machinist, marries and 
has two children. His wife dies and he leaves his 
children in England to be educated, comes to Amer- 
ica and becomes a travelling salesman, marries 
again and has more children, loses wife and chil- 
dren, goes to Australia and becomes a farmer. 
And so on, as many times as you want. Now in 
each place he has quite different environment and 
shows a different personality. His English wife 
was clinging and he was cruel. His American wife 
was self-assertive and cowed him into specious 



THE MECHANISMS 155 

meekness. His Australian wife was a butterfly and 
made him madly jealous. His other wives and 
families — But is he one person or X persons? 
And what is his spirit? A common quality run- 
ning through his variegated life? Which shall we 
elect to perpetuity? Possibly some of the dazed- 
ness reported by " spirits " newly arrived on the 
" other side " is that of persons who are bewildered 
by the problem of finding out who they really are. 
Which circle of growth, if we had to choose one, 
should we call the tree? 

To return to the previous topic. If we regard 
human personality as the effect of the laws known 
to applied science, we shall have to attribute the 
same kind of mentality to animals and all other 
types of life as we do to humans though not in the 
same degree. Something like intelligence, some- 
thing like consciousness is observed in even the 
lowest orders of life. Plants act as if they per- 
ceived and reacted according to their perceptions. 

Atoms of hydrogen do not unite with atoms of 
oxygen because they are perceived by humans to do 
so. The chemical laws thus far observed are es- 
sentially objective and uninfluenced by human 
wishes. The physiological laws according to which 
we move and grow are not changed by any mental- 
ity which they themselves produce. Cells prolifer- 
ate and chemical combination takes place and 
thoughts arise from the unconscious, all according 
to unalterable modes of action, but not because of 
the feeling of similarity in one man's physical or- 



156 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ganism, that enables him to see what things are, to 
him, like what other things. 

A secondary personality is a repressed personal- 
ity and, as such, is an organization of tensions 
which strives to make itself known to consciousness, 
although it itself is in the unconscious because it 
has been repressed. Its means of disguising itself 
so as to pass the censor of consciousness consist in 
the symbolizations made possible by the existence 
of the feelings of sameness and similarity. The 
history of secondary personalities is that they have 
either been brought into the consciousness of the 
primary personality by means of hypnotism or have 
alternated, as in cases like that of Ansel Bourne, 
one with another without apparent external cause. 

The medium is evidently an example of multiple 
personality, the elements of which come into view 
of the observers through the trance, through auto- 
matic writing, through crystal gazing and other 
ways. It is obvious that the seance is a method 
very advantageous to the medium in which to allow 
now one and now another of the organization of 
tensions constituting the different secondary per- 
sonalities to come out in external expression. I 
consider the contortions and other physical mani- 
festations to be due partly to conventionalized dra- 
matic " business," partly to the emotions abreacted 
by the medium. Dr. Ludwig Frank in his book 
elsewhere mentioned, has given a vivid account of 
the intensely dramatic actions of his patients in the 
half sleep catharsis with which he treats them. 



THE MECHANISMS 157 

The primary personality always has the best of 
reasons for repressing into the unconscious the 
material making up the secondary personalities. 
In the most of us this repression is almost com- 
pletely successful, the exceptions being our harm- 
less compulsions, phobias, superstitions and other 
idiosyncrasies. But in the case of the neurotic, 
whose repression is unsuccessful, the material of 
the secondary personality breaks forth as the neu- 
rosis, and in the medium it issues in his variegated 
performances. 

' 4j / § 4. Unconscious Memory 

«•/.. Constituted as we are now, however, in the twen- 
tieth century, we see and feel and act in certain 
ways that have been as yet but imperfectly de- 
scribed and scientifically correlated. I offer the 
suggestions, which have appeared to me to be made 
by my reading on the subject of the unconscious, 
by my own introspection, and the observation of 
other people analytically studied by me, sugges- 
tions concerning the inadvisability of making any 
definite statements, yet, about the post mortem or 
extra corporeal ante mortem existence or activit}^ 
of that very hazy and indefinite thing called mind 
or spirit. All the stronger is the suggestion be- 
cause of the actual novelty of the facts discovered 
concerning the mind in us that sees what we are 
not conscious of seeing, that hears what we are not 
conscious of hearing, that feels what we are not 
conscious of feeling, and remembers what we are 



158 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

not conscious of remembering. Until that time 
shall come when it will be possible for each one 
of us to evoke from the past the memory of every 
sensation we ever had, and examine it for its bear- 
ing upon the so-called supernormal media of in- 
telligence, it will be impossible certainly to say 
that the " messages " received by us in a medium's 
trance are anything else than messages from some 
lower stratum of the medium's unconscious mem- 
ory, which, because of some factor, which at pres- 
ent we are only beginning to recognize and under- 
stand, the medium is able to deliver. // 

The lower we go in the strata of unconscious 
memory, the farther back in the biography of the in- 
dividual we go. If in some future time the im- 
pressions received in prenatal life are ever revived 
by one individual and compared with those received 
at a similar stage of development by another in- 
dividual, there is little doubt that they would be 
exactly alike and consist mainly of pressure and 
motion and dim indistinct sound. There would be 
no sight, no smell, no taste, no temperature, and 
little fulness and emptiness feeling. 

Similarly if we trace back, as has actually been 
done by psychoanalysts, the associations of mental 
states and activities in the individual to their earli- 
est occurrences, we find them all revolving about 
the central ideas of mother and father and brothers 
and sisters. In humanity the comparatively great 
length of the period of infancy, i. e., dependent post- 
natal life, makes it evident that this helplessness, 



THE MECHANISMS 159 

joined to a comparatively active mental life, in 
eluding the incipient use of language, accounts for 
the fact that we are all cast in the same mould, all 
thinking about the same things, all having prac- 
tically the same impressions for five to seven years, 
all actuated by precisely the same instincts and 
impulses which centre about the relations of the 
different members of the family to each other and 
to us. 

If, then, a medium succeeds in tapping some very 
early impressions and in giving them out to the 
consciousness of other people, though he may not 
be conscious of them himself, he is quite likely to 
reproduce memories of what might have happened 
equally well to his sitters in their infancy or early 
childhood or to any one else whatever, brought up 
in any degree similar environment. These inci- 
dents would quite as well fit the recently dead as 
the living, and fit those who died a thousand years 
ago as well as those who died yesterday. The the- 
ory of probability is twisted by the spiritualists who 
say there is not one chance in a million that the 
medium could guess correctly. About some things 
there is the same chance that he could guess 
wrongly. Given enough indefiniteness in statement 
and matters from a deep enough level of uncon- 
scious memory he can't guess wrongly if he tries. 
The main principles of the occurrence of mental 
states and activities are the mechanisms of the un- 
conscious, all of which might be included in the one 
term integrations. The mind tends, just as nature 



160 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

everywhere tends, to make units or individual or- 
ganisms. This integration in psychological mate- 
rial is carried out through the association or, as it 
has sometimes been called, colligation of activities. 

§ 5. Earliest Sensations 

The earliest sensation making an impression on 
the recording apparatus of the developing nerve 
substance is in some manner associated or colli- 
gated with a subsequent impression. Nature seems 
to have arranged it that when another, a third, im- 
pression is made it is able, if sufficiently similar 
to the first, say sound impression, to make a re- 
action in another part of the organism and either 
to make no reaction in this part or to make a dif- 
ferent reaction if the second sound impression is 
different in quality. If the unborn child could 
think we should imagine him thinking to himself 
" There's a sound ! I heard a sound once before. 
Nice to hear sound again." Or " That's a squeeze ! 
Hate to be all squeezed up." And later : " That 
squeeze was worse than the other." But we sup- 
pose it cannot think, though we know that the 
physiological material for all those judgments is 
there long before birth. 

The identification of one mental state or activity 
of his own with another of his own is followed in 
due time, after birth and physically independent 
existence, by an identification of himself with ob- 
jects in the external world. He identifies himself 
with them intellectually and emotionally. Intel- 



THE MECHANISMS 161 

lectually his identification is objective or centri- 
fugal in character and may be illustrated by num- 
bers of childish ideas. He thinks the clouds are 
made of smoke. For him smoke is only his im- 
pression of smoke, and clouds are seen to be similar 
visually in some respects. 

§ 6. Intro jection 

It appears then that the internal sensations are 
the medium by which he centripetally identifies or 
introjects, and the external sensations are the 
means of his making centrifugal or objective identi- 
fications or projecting. It might be said that he 
attributes his feelings to things and therefore 
should be said to project them, but that is not an 
accurate way to word the matter. In introjection 
which is an emotional activity he adds to the num- 
ber of things which cause him emotional reactions. 
Fear which he should properly feel only about being 
born again, he feels about other things. He col- 
lects into his experience one thing after another to 
fear about. That is, he associates the internal sen- 
sation fear with an ever increasing number of ex- 
ternals. Therefore he introjects each and every 
one of them into that section of his emotional life 
that comprises fear. It is an actual entrance of 
things into his life. This is not the only emotional 
reaction, however, with which he associates or col- 
ligates external things and happenings. Many give 
him pleasure and joy. His character is profoundly 
affected by the nature and number of the externals 



162 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

that give him pleasurable emotions. I have taken 
fear only as an illustration where I might have 
taken several other internal sensations. But they 
would all illustrate introjection or the taking of 
real things into his emotional life. 

The identification, sometimes called objective 
identification, 1 is that by which later in life a per- 
son unconsciously behaves toward another person 
in the same way that he has behaved toward his 
father or mother in his childhood or to their surro- 
gates, and has been called transference. The in- 
ternal sensations associated with the earlier person 
are again associated with the later met individual, 
doctor, lawyer, minister or other person in author- 
ity, and lead to similar actions directed toward 
him. Transference is thus a reassociation of emo- 
tions and stands half way between the original col- 
ligation of emotions on the one hand, and acts and 
sensations on the other, and the other kind of asso- 
ciation of emotions with externals that are not 
essentially and logically connected with them — 
the introjection mentioned above. For taking a 
later acquaintance as a father surrogate there is 
frequently only the slightest external resemblance. 
It is much as if the psyche, like a child looking for 
a horse to ride on and finding a stick and strad- 
dling it and thinking it will do, was looking out 
for a father surrogate and would take any one who 
had the remotest resemblance to the original. It is 
easy to see that this choice will be very unlikely to 

i E. g., see Frink: Morbid Fears and Compulsions, p. 167, note. 



THE MECHANISMS 163 

be a fortunate one, as the person making it will ex- 
perience one disillusionment after another as the 
points of difference are gradually manifested to his 
consciousness. Such too is the history of many 
cases of love at first sight where the man finds in 
the woman some quality that arouses all the uncon- 
scious passion he has felt for his own mother, or 
where the woman falls in love not with the man as 
a whole but with some characteristic that resembles 
her father. 

A child is walking along a street and passes a 
house from which comes out a dog that follows the 
child, barking. The child is much frightened and 
from that time on dreads that particular house. 
The child has what might be called an exaggerated 
interest in the house. Particularly is this the case 
if the child, though informed that the dog has died 
or has been taken away, still feels a dread of the 
house, a not unknown situation. The house or its 
vicinity has become introjected into the child's 
mind. It is a matter of common observation that 
some children are more likely to be affected that 
way than others. 

Again, a relative of such a person dies and the 
death chamber, or even the house in which the death 
took place may, because of this event, become an 
unpleasant place, and remain so for a long time. 
Such people, who retain thus the association of un- 
pleasant emotions with definite localities are at- 
tributing to the locality a quality that is like them- 
selves, they are identifying a part of themselves 



164 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

(their unpleasant emotions) with some thing, so 
to speak, in itself absolutely colourless. They are 
introjecting the house into their own psyche. This 
is quite the history of haunted houses, except that 
the haunted house causes the introjection to take 
place in more people than one. A house where 
even a violent and tragic death took place would 
not cause the same identification with every one. 
The undertaker, for example, would not naturally 
feel much more about it than about any other house 
to which he had been called. But some of the 
friends or relatives will be particularly affected 
by the death chamber itself and even the house. 
They may for a long time avoid the street in which 
the house is situated. Those on whose actions the 
tragic death has most effect are the ones whose in- 
trojection is the greatest. 

We can easily see here that the psychical re- 
searcher has more than the average man intro- 
jected certain things. The introjection of the 
house, where the dog was, into the child's mind 
above is a perfectly ordinary one. The slightly 
added interest of the house where one's relative has 
died is also an ordinary one if it lasts only an 
ordinary time. But the permanent obsessive inter- 
est in the questions of spiritism is an introjection 
of an almost abnormal degree. Introjection is 
therefore an emotional interest in some external 
thing, an interest that in all persons is natural and 
normal for a brief period but in some persons 
reaches an unusual degree of intensity. The fea- 



THE MECHANISMS 165 

turing of the photographic reproductions, in news- 
papers, of scenes of murders and accidents is an 
appeal to the same introjection on the part of the 
readers, and the crowds that visit the scene of an 
accident, or murder, are giving evidence of a tem- 
porary introjection. Any one visiting scenes of 
that kind is identifying himself centripetally with 
some feature of the scene. The opposite minded 
man feels : " What earthly interest have I in seeing 
the blood stained wreckage? " Though if he ac- 
tually says it he may be protesting too much, in 
order to disguise an unconscious wish. 

Introjection is therefore an absolutely universal 
characteristic of all of us. It is only the unusual 
interest and degree of interest that marks the ab- 
normal tendency to introject. This tendency the 
psychical researcher shows in an extreme degree. 

§ 7. Projection 

Projection is normal in every one, but in those 
persons in which it reaches an abnormal degree 
it is considered one of the symptoms of paranoia. 
We project an idea upon some person or thing 
when we attribute to that person or thing ideas or 
feelings that really originate in our own minds; 
and, in attributing to a person an idea, we think 
that he has that idea, For example, a bad con- 
science is a quite universal instance of normal pro- 
jection. If we have done anything bad, it is bad 
only because other people think it is bad or would 
think it bad if they knew we had done it. If we 



166 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

were absolutely sure that no one else would con- 
sider a given action immoral it would not be im- 
moral but would be un-moral or non-moral. So it 
is evident that our judgment of the morality of our 
own actions is practically in every instance the 
criticism which we know or imagine other people 
would make of that action. Very young children 
are without this moral sense, and their elders are 
talking to them all the time about this and that 
being naughty ; so that they naturally get the idea 
that criticism of their actions is the most common 
attitude of other people. After a while they ac- 
quire a habit of automatically considering whether 
or not a proposed action is bad. Now the criti- 
cism has, to be sure, originally come from with- 
out, from parent or teacher, but in a particular 
instance, later, the proposed action may not be of 
sufficient interest to arouse any criticism favour- 
able or unfavourable on the part of any one in the 
child's environment. Yet the idea that mother or 
father might not like it occurs to the child in con- 
nection with the action. Actually the child does 
not know that it will displease his father or mother. 
The idea, however, that it will be criticized occur- 
ring to the child's mind, is in this instance at any 
rate an idea that did not originate from without. 
If this idea is accompanied by a vivid enough real- 
ity feeling, it will be projected by the child upon 
the parent, the child will think the parent averse 
to his action, will credit the parent with an atti- 
tude not really taken by the parent. 



THE MECHANISMS 167 

This notion on the child's part that the parent 
thinks unfavourably of his proposed action is the 
projection of the child's state of mind upon the 
parent, that is the projection upon that part of the 
parent's character actually experienced by the 
child of an idea originating in the child's mind and 
not actually experienced by the child in his contact 
with the parent. The parent's character is then 
partly actual, partly imaginary. It might be said 
that in this sense the projection is the imaginary 
part of the parent's character as perceived by the 
child, but it is to be noted that this part is only 
imaginatively perceived and not actually experi- 
enced. 

It is quite a well-known fact that this projection 
in some children at any rate includes the child's 
notion that after he has been guilty of doing some- 
thing he ought not to have done, the fact of his hav- 
ing done it is patent to other people. Because he 
knows himself that he has done wrong he gets the 
idea that other persons also know it and that they 
can read it in his face or in his subsequent actions. 
He thus projects on other people the knowledge 
that he has of his own acts, i. e., he supposes that 
other people know what he has done, though how 
they may know does not occur to him, any more 
than they may not know it. Every word, thought 
or action of the people of his environment may be 
interpreted by him in such a way as to make him 
believe that they know, so that he sometimes is 
quite puzzled as to why they do not take appro- v 



168 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

priate action. This projection mechanism is the 
basis of the old proverb Murder will out. 

This contribution of projected states of mind to 
the experiences of actual reality throws a very 
strong subjective colour over all experiences mak- 
ing it indeed a difficult if not impossible thing for 
any of us to sense things and relations of things 
as they really are. And when we reflect that any 
idea, feeling or wish is quite as likely as any other 
to be projected upon the personalities about us, 
it is no wonder that we are unable to see ourselves 
as others see us. For this there are two reasons, 
one that in seeing ourselves we are more under 
the influence of our own unconscious wishes and 
that we are seen by others through their own pro- 
jections. 

§ 8. Animism 

The earliest type of thought among peoples be- 
fore the era of simplest civilization was a projec- 
tion of their own ideas and feelings impartially 
upon other persons and inanimate things whether 
motionless, like rocks, or moving things, like clouds 
or rivers, the moon, sun and stars. With this pro- 
jection was connected the fact that the most patent 
characteristic of consciousness is its intermittence, 
broken as it is by sleep, by drugs, by a blow on the 
head and (a less patent fact) minutely broken by 
the very passage from one conscious impression to 
another of a different sense quality. 

It can hardly be denied that the most untutored 
mind would sometime experience the length of 



THE MECHANISMS 169 

time of darkness between sunset and sunrise, and 
on another occasion perhaps would experience the 
fact that he had slept most of this time. In all 
this time spent in sleep between sunset and sun- 
rise where was he? The memory of a dream 
would suggest to him that he might have been miles 
away from where he knew his body was sleeping. 
He was then different from his body, sometimes in 
it, and sometimes out of it. He dreams he is an 
eagle flying high in the air. Therefore he can leave 
his body, if it is asleep, and enter the body of an 
eagle. But there is something that keeps on en- 
tering and leaving his body rhythmically all day — 
his breath. On cold mornings he can see it leave 
his nostrils. And the word for breath in most 
languages is the word for spirit. Therefore his 
spirit or the breath or air form of his body can 
leave his flesh-and-blood body and "naked on the 
air of heaven ride." 

But other people and animals have breath. He 
can see and feel it too. They too have spirits. 
The waterfall has a spirit. He can see it passing 
from the cataract in a fine mist. The trees have 
spirits too, which gather in filmy clouds on the 
mountain sides. Sometimes they take the form 
of a tree or an animal. 

If the spirit does not return, the body never 
moves again and presently disintegrates. What 
could be more patent to the senses. The untu- 
tored mind projects upon the dead the idea emanat- 
ing from his own mind, namely that his spirit has 



170 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

departed. When the untutored mind dreams, he 
is able to do things he could not have done in his 
body; therefore the spirits of the dead can pass 
from place to place, can enter the bodies of other 
men and animals, can enter trees, waterfalls, moun- 
tains or the heavenly bodies. 

Yet this notion that the spirit leaves the body is 
but a projection in the sense we have just used it 
above. It is the supposition that other people have 
the same ability to " cast the dust aside " and do 
what he, the untutored mind, thinks he can do him- 
self, and furthermore that other animate and in- 
animate beings have the same powers. As a bit of 
scientific reasoning, it is absolutely on a par with 
the reasoning of a child that his parents know that 
he has done wrong or that they will scold or pun- 
ish him for this particular wrong. 

There is absolutely nothing abnormal or un- 
usual about this purely human habit of thought 
called projection. It is a thought mechanism op- 
erative in all thinking individuals, only it is not 
productive of scientific judgments. 

§ 9. Attitude Toward Departed 

Now if we confine our discussion to the feelings 
of the survivors concerning the dead, we shall find 
from a study of funeral rites and mourning cus- 
toms among primitive peoples that, in all of these 
rites and customs factors are present which show 
both love and hate, friendliness and hostility, both 
actual and projected. The friendliness and love 



THE MECHANISMS 171 

are shown in the ancestor worship, and the hate 
and hostility in the belief in evil spirits and de- 
mons; and we shall see that all of these are pro- 
jections on the part of the survivors. 1 

It may well be the case that the departed was a 
character of mingled good and evil, as indeed we 
all are, but the thoughts that occur about him tend 
of their own accord to integrate themselves into 
systems and for a short time after his death the 
departed savage is regarded as a hostile spirit, 
who has to be appeased in eery possible way so 
that he may not do harm to the survivors. It may 
happen that just this attitude of primitive man 
toward the dead may still live in the present day 
in the shape of attention given by the psychical re- 
searchers to spiritual phenomena. It is in one 
sense both an ancestor worship and an exorcism es- 
sentially, in effect, though done in the guise of ex- 
perimental science. In any case it is a projection 
as evident to the truly scientific mind as are the 
most obvious projections of the child or the savage. 

§ 10. Science and the Reality Feeling 

It is characteristic of science, however, on the 
other hand to disregard entirely the reality feeling 
as a criterion of reality and to substitute for it 
observed relations of things. And these relations 
of things do not in any way impress this internal 
sense which I have described as the feeling of real- 
ity. The facts of science are things that are un- 

i Cp. Chap. VIII, sec. 7. 



172 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

able to awaken this sensation of reality which is 
the internal or organic sense impressed by the co- 
operative working of all the other senses. Some 
of the facts of astronomy for example are such as 
to leave the subjective feeling of reality quite un- 
touched, yet no one has any doubt of their actuality 
nor can any one be said merely to believe them who 
has taken the trouble to acquaint himself with 
them. He can truly be said to know that they are 
real without their even having impressed his in- 
ternal reality feeling in the least. 

Similarly, he may be truthfully said to know the 
facts of animal cell structure after study of stained 
specimens by means of the microscope. He knows 
there are objects called chromosomes or " coloured 
bodies " in the cell because certain dyes adhere to 
them and render them visible to his eye. 

He does not project upon the stars on the one 
hand, nor upon the cell plasm on the other hand 
any of his own subjective notions. His entire pro- 
cedure has been wholly to exclude anything like 
such projection. This projection, however, was the 
rule in ancient star gazing. We speak today of a 
constellation as Orion because the ancient Greeks 
projected their own notions upon the stars, and 
scientific language still contains the verbal relics 
of earlier projections as in the word oxygen which 
describes the ideas about that gas entertained by 
the early chemists, namely that it created acids. 

It may be replied that in a sense any scientific 
theory is a projection in that it is a human view of 



THE MECHANISMS 173 

a concrete reality. But it may be answered that 
the supposition is made only to see if it will work, 
and is immediately replaced by another supposi- 
tion if it does not work. In contrast to which the 
attitude of the spiritists is always to find proofs 
of the objective reality of their own projections, 
though they strenuously deny this attitude when- 
ever it is intimated. The whole history of the spir- 
itistic movement is that of a recrudescence of the 
animism of primitive man, it is the effort to be sci- 
entific in doing an absolutely unscientific thing. It 
is the continued struggle to get scientific proof for 
a belief, as contrasted with the attempt of the true 
scientist to ascertain what really are the relations 
of things quite apart from the conscious or uncon- 
scious wish for something that may or may not 
exist. It is again the constant attempt to prove 
one thing, namely the independent existence of 
" spirit " apart from matter, which as we have seen 
above, is the belief (that is, the unconscious wish) 
of the untutored mind. The motives for this wish 
have been discussed elsewhere. 

§ 11. Science and Projection 

The contrast between projection and scientific 
attitude is as that between the east and the west. 
We might almost use the word injection to describe 
the aim of science which is to get the world as it 
is into the intellect of man, while projection is get- 
ting the feeling of man into the world of reality. 

Now while the aim of all creative human w T ork 



174 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

is to change external reality and to impress as much 
of nature as possible with a human stamp, it nat- 
urally occurs to the scientist with the widest view 
of the phenomena of the universe that not only is 
the humanizing of the universe a task quite incom- 
mensurate with human abilities, but also it might 
not in the end be altogether desirable if it were 
possible. 

It is unquestionable that spiritism is an an- 
thropomorphic tendency, while science might be 
called cosmomorphic. All the petty details of the 
nature of the clothes spirits wear, of their being 
sexed or sexless, of their diversions, even of the 
cigars they smoke and the food and drink they en- 
joy, are, on the face of them, projections as crass as 
the houris of the Mohammedan paradise, and the 
bows and arrows of the American Indian happy 
hunting ground ; and they have far less poetical ap- 
peal than the Hellenic phantasies of ambrosia and 
nectar and of the golden apples of the Gardens of 
the Hesperides. Truly in matter of actual detail 
the modern mythology is but a rubbish heap com- 
pared with the ancient, and the one is quite as 
much a scientific demonstration as the other. The 
ancients frankly indulged in their fondest dreams 
and projected them into their myths. Moderns 
have been coerced in a sense by scientific thought 
into giving a materialistic form to their beliefs, a 
form which lacks all the spontaneity of the ancient 
unrepressed dream of the future life. The only 
sensible procedure for belief is to acknowledge it- 



THE MECHANISMS 175 

self as belief. It works much better so, and pro- 
duces better results. It is really more pragmatic 
in being itself and not trying to be something else. 
But in attempting a scientific proof for a sub- 
jective belief one puts the cart before the horse. 
Bather should we attempt to clothe our scientific 
truths with the unconscious wish. This suggests 
the ever-present conflict between inner and outer 
life, a conflict which is sometimes compromised by 
the tacit agreement on our part to take the world 
as we find it and not to look in it for something that 
is only in ourselves. The individual's attitude is 
determined by his disposition, the tender-minded 
idealist deceiving himself as much as he dares 
to, the tough-minded realist and materialist get- 
ting as much pleasure out of an unimaginative 
life as he can. Those concerned to an extreme 
degree in the question of either an after life or 
a supernormal sensitivity in this life are laying 
excessive stress on the value of the subjective 
element. Others, like Darwin, who at times re- 
gretted his exclusively rigid and scientific habit 
of thought, are stressing the other values. There 
is no doubt as to where to place the psychical 
researcher in this classification of temperaments. 
Were it not for the increasing insistence of sci- 
entific habits of mind there would be no scientific 
plank in the psychical research platform, in spite 
of the fact that the researchers protest that they do 
not have as their aim the proof of spiritism. Were 
it not for the fact that the formulations of science 



176 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

are acquiring more and more of the tone of author- 
ity, and that men now realize that what is known 
can be known only through scientific methods, there 
would be no motive for psychical research, for every 
story of an apparition or of a voice from the air or 
of an unaccountable movement of any object would 
find ready belief. 

§ 12. Reality Thinking and Life 

But nowadays imagination and belief are not 
enough to make a man successful in adapting him- 
self to his environment. He needs the knowledge 
based on statistical investigation of the relations 
of things in order successfully to manage his in- 
surance companies, his manufactures, his traffic, his 
chain stores. This shows that human nature has 
changed to the extent of requiring knowledge of re- 
lations of things in the place of belief as to their 
pleasure-producing or pain-producing qualities. 
This is the contrast elsewhere mentioned between 
the reality and the pleasure-pain modes of think- 
ing. So that any question as to the relative value 
of the two modes is answered by the facts of society 
as it exists today. The tendency is toward mate- 
rialism, toward tough-minded knowledge, and away 
from tender-minded belief. 

The emotions, which are characteristic of the ten- 
der-minded element of humanity, are nevertheless 
of positive value, and while they are the last to be 
valued it will soon be found even by the most tough- 
minded materialist, that they have this concrete 



THE MECHANISMS 177 

and merchantable value, and that a business per- 
fectly developed in every other way will not success- 
fully compete with another which has in addition 
enlisted the emotions. And it will not be able to 
enlist them without a very elaborate investigation 
into them such as has never before been undertaken. 
And without the knowledge of the nature and func- 
tions of both conscious and unconscious emotions 
such an investigation will be fruitless. For hith- 
erto the fact has been ignored not only that the 
emotions of surprise, awe, reverence and profound 
somatic satisfaction are aroused in many people by 
hearing the stories of the triumph of spirit over 
matter, but also that the unconscious emotions of 
joy and sorrow, disappointment, love, hate, and rage 
actuate or at any rate give additional force to the 
efforts of all men in all lines of activity whether 
commercial, professional or artistic. 

For it should not be forgotten ( 1 ) that we do all 
things to get a present or postponed conscious or 
unconscious satisfaction which is the relaxation of 
tensions in our multitudes of muscular systems 
throughout the body, (2) that a long continued ten- 
sion frequently needs a violent action in order to 
neutralize it, and ( 3 ) that these tensions and relax- 
ations are going on in our bodies constantly and 
below the level of consciousness. Only recently has 
any positive contribution been made to knowledge 
about the effects of these neutralizations in daily 
life, their effects upon health, and their causation 
of functional diseases. It is not unlikely that in 



178 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

the near future the intense anxiety about death and 
the life after death will be commonly recognized as 
a result of an incipient functional heart disorder, 
and will show that normally men have no real 
pragmatic motives for giving a thought to prob- 
lems of hypersensitivity and post mortem conscious 
existence, and that the intense curiosity about the 
solution of such problems is a mark of subnormal 
mentality or of a slight mental disorder which later 
may become more serious. 

§ 13. The Reality Feeling vs. Reality Thinking 

We must carefully distinguish between the real- 
ity feeling described in Chapter II and reality 
thinking or thinking directed according to the real- 
ity principle. The first is a sensation, an impres- 
sion made through sense organs situated in the 
body. The second is a process of thought deter- 
mined by observed relations between things in the 
external world. To the illogical and unwarranted 
transfer of the reality feeling from external sen- 
sations to internally aroused visual, auditory and 
other types of images is due the huge mass of volu- 
minously attested phenomena that are held to prove 
the existence of spirit. To the process of reality 
thinking we are indebted for the present state of 
scientific knowledge, which, though it has not an- 
swered all the questions we can ask, has neverthe- 
less performed a solidly constructive work in the 
world. 



THE MECHANISMS 179 

The images of sight, sound, etc., which occur to 
us are all determined by the opposite of reality 
thinking namely the pleasure-pain principle. The 
laws of nature are discovered through the reality 
principle. The idea of divinity is traceable from 
the crudest theriomorphic and anthropomorphic 
forms to the refined forms existing in the minds of 
the most cultivated people of today. This change 
in ideas demonstrates that they are but ideas, being 
the projections into externality, of the unconscious 
wish, which is fundamentally the same and varies 
in superficial details according to the conscious life 
of the people in whom ideas of divinity arise. 

To return to the effect of the feeling of reality 
upon belief, and the absence of this subjective feel- 
ing from any scientific work, we must emphasize 
again the importance of this distinction. The cri- 
terion which is used in scientific observations where 
instruments of precision are used is the feeling of 
sameness, or the feeling of similarity. To illus- 
trate this I would mention the observer seated at 
the telescope watching a star cross the field of 
vision. The task set is, as the star passes five 
small lines in the field, to record the time by push- 
ing a button that causes a mark to be made on a 
revolving drum which keeps the time. The star 
seems to stretch out arms of light toward the line, 
grasp it, swing round it, let go and pass on to the 
next. Each time the star swings round a line the 
observer has the feeling of sameness and as he has 



180 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

it lie pushes the button. His action is brought to 
a focus by the internal, organic sensation of same- 
ness. 

Again, if we are matching two colours, we glance 
from one surface to the other in order to detect any 
difference, which is recorded in us, up to the limit 
of our ability visually to discriminate, by the ab- 
sence of the feeling of sameness. 

Now as the fineness of discrimination, depending 
possibly on purely visual impressions in either of 
the two illustrations just mentioned, and, in the 
first illustration, the rapidity of action in pressing 
the button varies with different individuals there is 
recognized a difference of reaction; and this differ- 
ence, where human senses are involved has to be 
allowed for in all exact measurements and is known 
as the personal equation. 

Also the fact that this human fallibility is the 
source of error leads scientists to replace human 
senses by other sensitive media wherever possible, 
as in the photographs of stars, and, in the ques- 
tion of colours, by refined methods of mixing and 
distributing pigments. And following this the 
psychical researchers have attempted the same 
methods but with unavailable results. The " spirit 
photographs " thus far produced have been prac- 
tically incomprehensible or without important sig- 
nificance, as their interpretation is of far more mo- 
ment than the photographs themselves, even if we 
accepted them as authentic ; and they appear to have 
no connection with anything mental. 



THE MECHANISMS 181 

§ 14. Unconscious Perceptions 

Unconscious perceptions are quite a familiar ex- 
perience. As we walk in a crowded street we see 
the face of a person we know and later recall that 
we have seen it. It might be said that we see it, 
and in another sense we do not. The sight cannot 
be called fully conscious nor yet can it be called 
absolutely unconscious simply for the reason that it 
later appears in consciousness in the setting in 
which it actually occurred, i. e., as a face among a 
crowd of other faces. There may be the memory 
merely of a face we knew without the memory of 
the person's name. But the fact is that later, for 
example, when at home after dinner we may be 
sitting in revery, we have this person's face appear 
before our mental eye, either with or without the 
consciousness of his name but with the conscious- 
ness of its having first been a visual impression 
among others of the crowded street. 1 This is an 
unconscious perception. At any rate (if the face 
w T as perceived without the name) the perception 
is unconscious in so far as the name itself is con- 
cerned. Here is a perception, then, at least part 
of which is unconscious. It may be said that we 
could not perceive his name unless he had been 
tagged with it in some way visible to our physical 
eye. To this we might reply that the name of any 
one is mentally tagged on him and that the tag 

i It will elsewhere be shown that only the concomitant feeling 
of reality existing with the original actual sensation differen- 
tiates the so-called real experience from the mental image. 



182 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

should be quite as visible to us mentally as his face 
was visually. In this sense we unconsciously per- 
ceive his name too, for the association once made 
mentally between the man and his name is retained 
unconsciously, as is the whole series of events and 
experiences which are in any way associated with 
his personality. The semi-conscious sight of his 
face was only one link in a chain, a link which 
alone appeared above the surface of consciousness 
leaving all the other links of the chain below. A 
very definite reason is given by psychoanalysis why 
the other links do not emerge, a. reason to which I 
shall have to refer elsewhere in this volume. 

But here I wish to contrast on the one hand the 
semiconscious perception of a face in a crowd ac- 
companied, not at the actual time but later, by the 
feeling of familiarity which indicates the presence, 
in the mind, of a number of associations connected 
with that particular face, — the contrast with, on 
the other hand, the number of unconscious percep- 
tions of facts about the owner of the face, percep- 
tions that are made by the unconscious mind, not 
merely impressions made on it, and perceptions 
which later may come into consciousness, at volun- 
tary summons or of their own accord, and which 
could by no means be called in any sense conscious 
at the time. 

§ 15. Reading Mechanisms 

As an example of the perception of things uncon- 
sciously I would offer the following type of experi- 



THE MECHANISMS 183 

ence which I have had myself and which other peo- 
ple have communicated to me. In reading a 
printed page the eye is fixed upon one word at a 
time. While it is fixed on that word, the words 
both to the right and left of it are read so that we 
may say the eye moves so many times from left to 
right on each line and at the end of each line jumps 
back from right to left and fixates one of the let- 
ters, but not the first, of the first word on the line. 
The line is read in groups of words, the eye taking 
in one group and then passing to the fixation point 
of the next, jumping the distance one way, say, in 
four jumps and then back to the first word of the 
line in one jump from the fixation point of the last 
group of the line just read. If the line should con- 
sist of four long words of about equal length, the 
jumps would be from the middle of each word to 
the middle of the next, etc. During the jump it- 
self the visual consciousness is intermitted. We 
see nothing (consciously, at any rate), while the 
eye is actually in motion, the reading of this sup- 
posed four word line being therefore a matter of 
four conscious periods interrupted by three inter- 
vening periods of unconsciousness. 

Now while the eye is consciously reading any one 
of the four groups each one of them approximately 
one quarter of the line long, it is able to take in 
visually and consciously a certain number of words 
in the line above, the line below and in the lines 
above and below them respectively. But while it 
is possible consciously to fixate the eye on one let- 



184 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ter and read the whole word which contains the 
letter that is fixated, and also a word above it and 
a word below it, it is not actually done that way as 
a general rule by people who read much. Con- 
scious perception is confined to the line that is 
being actually read at the time, and while the scope 
of conscious vision may be an inch from left to 
right, it is not generally more than one-eighth of an 
inch from top to bottom in actual reading. Ex- 
perimentally I can fix my eye on the word of in the 
following passage and, without moving my eye, con- 
sciously see " on war. Had " on the preceding 
line " League of Nations " on the fixated line and 
" could not M on the line below. 

terials essential to war. To the end 
of the war she imported iron ore from 
Sweden. Until almost the last year of 
the war she drained Holland, Switzer- 
land, and Scandinavia of concentrated 
foodstuffs. Previous to their own en- 
try into hostilities, Rumania, Bulgaria, 
and Italy sent to Germany enormous 
qualities of vital supplies which she 
did not produce in sufficient quantity 
to carry on war. Had the Covenant 
of the League of Nations been in force 
Germany could not have received those 
supplies. Germany would have real- 
It is easy to see that this remaining unconscious 
of the words in the preceding and the following line 
is necessary to preserve the integrity of the proper 
sequence of thought in reading. For consider what 
would be the result of the confusion of three lines 



THE MECHANISMS 185 

in the case of the reader who is auditory minded. 
Such readers, when reading silently hear the words 
just as if spoken in the tone-quality of their own 
voices, or, in the case of words written by persons 
whose voices they know, in the tone-quality of those 
persons' voices. There is absolutely no difference 
between the two qualities of sensation except in- 
tensity, the mentally heard word being much 
fainter and unaccompanied by the reality feeling. 
Now we must suppose that the actual sight of 
the word groups in succession causes the release 
of processes, constituting the auditory imagery in 
the consciousness of the reader, and if this release 
worked quite impartially as far as the actual visual 
impressions go, the auditory imagery of three 
groups of words would be released into conscious- 
ness, one group on the line visually fixated, another 
on the one above it and the third on the line below 
it. This simultaneous release of auditory mental 
imagery of three different and conflicting groups 
of sounds would be exceedingly confusing. We 
have therefore trained ourselves to become oblivious 
to those of the uppermost and lowest of the three 
lines. We have in a sense narrowed our conscious- 
ness by learning to read. Analogous statements 
could be made about those readers who are in the 
habit of supplementing their visual reading with 
imagery of the voice motor sensations. Indeed 
we find that slightly educated persons who tend to 
read aloud to themselves, or who move their lips 
in reading without making sounds, are sometimes 



186 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

in the habit of holding a finger under the word 
group being read as if the better to focus their 
vision and possibly to exclude impressions from 
word groups below\ 

To return to the unconscious perception of 
visual impressions I would call attention to the 
phenomenon I mentioned at the beginning of this 
section, and for which the preceding paragraphs 
have been merely introductory. At one time I hap- 
pened to observe a number of instances where words 
or letters from a line or two or three lines below 
where I was consciously reading would unite in 
combinations that made words and that these 
words would spring into consciousness, interrupt- 
ing the sense of the passage. 1 Thus in a passage I 
was reading, the word " insult " suddenly appeared 
in my auditory imagery, interrupting the sense of 
the passage. Being then curious as to the origin 
of that idea which was quite foreign to the sense 
of the passage I quickly looked below to see if the 
writer could possibly be going to talk about insults. 
I could not find the word. It was not on the page ; 
but I did find " in " in the next line and " suit " as 
a part of the word " consultation " in the line 
below it. The word insult therefore was, and 
at the same time was not, on the page. I noticed 
this unconscious combination of letters and parts 
of words into whole words unconnected or only 
remotely connected with the passage being read 
on many occasions after that until I had con- 

i See also Wilfrid Lay: Mori's Unconscious Conflict, page 206. 



THE MECHANISMS 187 

vinced myself of the fact that the coalescence 
had taken place in the unconscious and through 
the unconscious mental activity and had occurred 
with such clearness and force that it had of 
its own power sprung into consciousness and 
caused an interruption of the train of thought con- 
ditioned by the reading. Then I ceased to notice 
these unconscious sensible combinations. I did not 
attempt to find out why the word insult should 
have had such easy access to my conscious thought. 
Possibly I may have been touchy at the time and 
sensitive about what some one had said to me. 

Another illustration of the combination of im- 
pressions below the threshold of consciousness is 
one that is typical of a group of such experiences 
that might be termed unconscious substitution. 

§ 16. The Unconscious Combination of Ideas 

I sat reading one summer evening in an old cot- 
tage by the ocean. I had my fountain pen lying on 
the table beside my book to make an occasional 
note. The table cover was of white linen. Much 
absorbed in what I was reading, I yet became con- 
scious of a peculiar odour. My first thought was 
that the dampness of the atmosphere at the time 
had brought out some old musty smell from the 
house. Next I saw that in moving my book I had 
rumpled the table cloth, and a fold of it had risen 
up and touched the point of my pen from which had 
been drawn, by the capillary action of the linen, a 
spot of ink the size of a dime. Something impelled 



188 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

me to put my nose down to the spot and sniff it. 
That was the odour. It was ink I had been smell- 
ing. I was vexed with myself for having, through 
my carelessness in laying the pen down, stained the 
white linen table cloth, and was puzzled that I had 
not seen it touch the pen, or seen the spot before it 
grew so large, but the fact remains that, while 
the spot was quite large enough to be seen while I 
was reading, I had not seen it until I smelled it. It 
was quite evident to me that the spot had been un- 
consciously seen by me all the time, but that the 
realization of its presence came through the sense 
of smell. It is much as if the total emotional re- 
action had been like another person trying to tell 
me that I was staining the cloth by my careless act, 
and, failing to impress my vision, had tried another 
avenue of sense. The idea of slight damage had 
been present in my unconscious mind for some time, 
through both the senses of sight and smell, had been 
struggling to enter consciousness in order to avert 
further damage, and could not impress me visually ; 
but had succeeded through the sense of smell in 
diverting my attention from my reading and arous- 
ing me to the action which my present environment 
required — the putting of the pen in a place where 
it would not spill any more ink. Unconsciously, 
therefore, the sense of smell was substituted for 
that of sight and the actions were linked with the 
former which would ordinarily have been associated 
with the latter. The whole incident was entirely 
apart from any conscious volition of mine. It 



THE MECHANISMS 189 

seems quite clearly to show a state of mind that can- 
not be called anything else than unconscious voli- 
tion. But it surely demonstrates unconscious per- 
ception and reasoning. The perception consisted 
of the association of one sense quality with another, 
which was shown by my turning my gaze from book 
to table cloth, and by the connecting of the odour of 
the ink with the idea of something peculiar and un- 
desirable. While I was thinking that the odour 
was that of the aged timber, plaster and wall paper 
of the room I was in, I was still reading. The im- 
pression of a peculiar odour came several times be- 
fore I looked and saw. It reminds me of the dumb 
show of excitement of a dog that wants human aid 
in some emergency. But as will be evident there 
was a highly complicated process going on in my 
mind, the only conscious elements of which were 
the reading, the odour, and finally the conscious 
sight of the ink spot some time after it had become 
unconsciously visible. 

§ 17. Miracles 

The greatest miracles are the commonest occur- 
rences of every day life such as these, and it requires 
only interest and close attention to see in them the 
extremely complicated interplay of one sense qual- 
ity with the others and their connection with ac- 
tions carried out into the external world. One is 
impressed with the fact that there is nothing in 
any of the " phenomena " of spiritualism any more 
wonderful than almost anything that takes place 



100 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

around us or in us every day. The performance of 
the antennae or the coherer in the wireless is no 
less remarkable than the hypersensitivity of the 
medium in receiving spirit messages. In the re- 
stricted sense of the word believe, I believe in both 
impartially; but there is a sort of universality and 
ready controllability in the wireless apparatus, a 
systematization such that any boy can set it up, if 
he follows definite directions, and can receive mes- 
sages coming from hundreds of miles. And the ap- 
parent contradiction of the law of gravitation 
which we see in tacks, iron filings, etc., rising ver- 
tically from the earth to a magnet suspended above 
them is no less wonderful than the levitation and 
other materialization phenomena. The difference 
is only the rarity of the latter, should the latter be 
scientifically proved real. 

There is enough mystery on earth and in life and 
the question naturally occurs as to what might be 
the cause of the attention of some men and women 
being turned from the here-and-now to the here- 
after. It is not alone that more excitement is se- 
cured, for there is sufficiently gripping interest in 
the commonest natural phenomena about us. The 
question is not : " Why look for mystery? " for the 
satisfaction of curiosity is perennially demanded; 
but : " Why choose this particular field for exhibit- 
ing curiosity? " The answer will, I think, be made 
plain in what follows. 

We get the impression that psychical research 
is going after the rare and contradictory per se; 



THE MECHANISMS 191 

and that the well known facts of physics are not 
considered of sufficient importance to have deduced 
from them the existence of an intelligence direct- 
ing and planning the universe, as illustrated, for 
example, in the expansion of water in cooling from 
4° to 0° centigrade. But what the psychical re- 
searchers are interested in is things much rarer 
which are seized upon first as exceptions to the uni- 
versal laws of nature. 

W. McDougall, President of the English Society 
for Psychical Kesearch says : * " It is the organized 
attempt to apply the methods of science to these 
hoary problems, the problem of supernormal powers 
of perception and communication, the problem of 
modes of action on and in the physical world not 
hitherto recognized, the supreme problem of the 
life after death." 

§ 18. Desire for the Extraordinary 

Thus it is evident that the exception to the nor- 
mal or average has for a certain class of people a 
disproportionate interest in itself. This is one of 
the many methods of acquiring or at any rate seem- 
ing to acquire an amplification of the ego. The 
general run of people are content with the average 
dimensions so to speak of their individualities. 
Consciously they desire to increase them neither 
in space nor time; but for a certain type of people 
the unconscious craving for mere extension of ego 
is shown in their conscious interests in the so-called 

x New York Evening Post, Oct. 30, 1920, 



192 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

marvels of spiritism. They feel that their con- 
sciousness is a feature of their existence which, 
they desire beyond all things to feel assured, will 
remain, after all the physical matter composing 
their bodies has been dissipated ; and they feel that 
their consciousness is the more satisfactory if it 
can, in clairvoyance, crystal gazing, dowsing, etc., 
extend beyond the limits of the ordinary conscious- 
nesses which they see about them. 

In this we see that the extension of the ego is but 
a comparative matter; and, if we were all clair- 
voyant and telepathic, these people would have to 
be interested not in the common phenomenon of 
clairvoyance but in some rarer manifestation. 
One cannot but think that if the energies devoted 
to these present rarities had been bestowed upon 
the research into the nature and laws of manifesta- 
tion of the human emotions and the effects of these 
upon health and conduct and morals, we should be 
living in a far different world. For as yet little 
is scientifically known, compared to what would 
be necessary for a really rational living of life, 
about these most common sensations, common to 
every human being and common to almost every 
moment of his or her life, conscious and uncon- 
scious. 

On the other hand physics and chemistry have 
taken the most obvious and the most common 
things and have devoted attention to the discovery 
of the universal laws according to which they act. 
One cannot help being impressed by the very di- 



THE MECHANISMS 193 

vergent aims of the pure and applied sciences and 
of psychical research. The psychical researchers' 
appreciation of this divergence is shown in the cry 
of materialism which they raise against science, a 
criticism expressed in the term of spiritism, which 
implies that matter, as they understand it, does not 
come up to their expectations as they conceive them, 
of what matter ought to be capable of, or of what 
qualities matter ought, as they think, to have. 

Their implied criticism of matter contains always 
the unconscious wish that at least some matter 
might be peculiar and not subject to the laws gov- 
erning the rest of it. And as will be elsewhere 
shown a wish is always for something non-existent 
or supposed to be non-existent. For example the 
wonderful, which is at our feet and in the air we 
breathe, is evidently passed over by a certain type 
of mind and something radically different is sought 
as an object of wonder. 

§ 19. Desire for Excitement 

It is more than likely that besides the uncon- 
scious desire for the amplification of the ego mani- 
fested in all spiritual phenomena, there is also an 
additional factor in the unconscious wish for ex- 
citement. The ideational content of spiritistic 
phenomena is nothing if not exciting, being in a 
sense cataclysmic in its apparent denial, now of 
one, now of another, of nature's laws. That the 
ordinarily invisible should become visible, the un- 
heard heard, and that the material body should 



194 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

have a spiritual body accompanying it and all the 
other phenomena of spiritism are so strikingly at 
variance with average experience, as to belong 
really to that class of ideas known as newspaper 
stuff — the strange, odd, freakish, outre, excessive, 
sensational. 

It is a theory of psychoanalysis that all excite- 
ment is fundamentally sexual in the sense that men 
and women who lack the normal tensions and re- 
laxations in that sphere, will with irresistible im- 
pulse make for themselves tensions and relaxations 
in other spheres. The close coincidence between 
the abnormal in personality and the medium him- 
self would almost alone suggest this. The average 
human couple living a regular and normal love-life 
show very little tendency as a general thing to in- 
terest themselves in the strange or the sensational. 
Secure in their mutual love, they have no great con- 
cern about the distant or the future, the present 
in time or place filling them with the unutterable 
satisfaction of rhythmically occurring emotional 
tensions and relaxations, wherein their sex life acts 
as a sort of gyroscope, a stabilizer that prevents 
them from, so to speak, shooting out of their 
spheres. 

But when one of the couple dies or is untrue to 
the other or if for any reason the true mutuality 
of their love-life is diminished it is quite common 
for one, or both, if both survive, to develop a strong 
propensity for other varieties of excitement, which 
are found, to be sure, in many spheres of human ac- 



THE MECHANISMS 195 

tivity, but for a certain type of mind nowhere so 
certainly as in the various forms of spiritism. The 
unconscious craving too, if it remains strong after 
the average days of human love-life, will naturally 
seek a vicarious outlet. And we see the phe- 
nomenon of many a man and woman ridiculing the 
idea of spiritism in their earlier life and in later 
life becoming convinced of the truth of spirit rap- 
pings and other unusual things. 

§ 20. Transference 

In this chapter I have tried both to describe the 
modes o,r processes of unconscious mental activity 
that most markedly concern the problem of spirit- 
ism, and to show that the universal mechanism of 
projection has for its inevitable work the attribut- 
ing of qualities, like those possessed by the uncon- 
scious thinker, not only to objects around him but 
also to an object " spirit " which has no existence 
that can be proved by science. I have traced this 
projection mechanism from its most elementary 
forms in the primitive belief in animism. I have 
mentioned the fact that introjection, unconscious 
perception and unconscious combination of ideas 
produce results that enter consciousness w T ith a 
peculiar persuasiveness, and not being attributable 
to any living person, they will naturally be at- 
tributed either to divinity or to spirit. I have 
shown that the desire for the extraordinary and for 
the excitement which the extraordinary produces is 
an important factor in the genesis of those ideas 



196 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

leading to a belief in spirits. Another potent 
factor in the causation of these ideas is transfer- 
ence. 

Transference is the re-association in the individ- 
ual's unconscious mind of mental states that are 
originally associated with one person (father or 
mother) , with another person. The individual un- 
consciously transfers his own mental states from 
one person to another. 

The mental states thus transferred include both 
types — images and internal sensations. External 
stimuli cannot be included because they do not 
group themselves. Transferring an image or emo- 
tion from one individual re-associating in his own 
mind that image or emotion with the other person, 
or more properly speaking, with the ideas held by 
the first person about the other. Thus the emo- 
tions felt in infancy toward the father are uncon- 
sciously transferred to the psychoanalyst, the phy- 
sician, clergyman, lawyer, etc. The physician or 
psychoanalyst today arouses in the individual the 
same unconscious feelings and ideas that the father 
did years ago. 

In spiritism we see the transfer of these feelings 
to the medium. In infancy the father was re- 
garded as omniscient and omnipotent. If the me- 
dium has received in later years this transference, 
he becomes omnipotent or at least as omnipotent as 
the reality feeling of the individual will allow him 
to be. Thus, whatever powers can be attributed 
to the medium, over and above those possessed by 



THE MECHANISMS 197 

ordinary people, will help to make the medium om- 
nipotent in the eyes of the individual. In order to 
be wholly omnipotent, he would have to be able to 
break all the observed laws of natural phenomena. 
The more of these laws he can break, the more pow- 
erful he becomes, and the closer he approaches to 
the actually omnipotent. The closer he approaches 
this limit, the greater the individual's satisfaction ; 
as it is a gratification of his own unconscious wish 
both to be omnipotent and to partake of omnipo- 
tence. 

Therefore the spiritist's aim is solely to collect 
these breaks. Every so-called proof of existence 
after death thus feeds both the unconscious wish of 
the spiritist to be omnipotent and strengthens the 
transference of the spiritist to the medium, thus 
reviving in the spiritist the original transference 
that he had for his own parent when he was an 
infant. The spiritist's attitude toward the medium 
is- therefore an almost exclusively infantile atti- 
tude, as is indeed that of many toward their heroes. 
We have here the. apparent paradox of a person's 
feeding his unconscious desire to be himself omni- 
potent, by making another person, the medium, om- 
nipotent. Even Sir Oliver Lodge, in referring to 
the " privileged persons " 1 who are allowed to be 
the instruments of communication of the messages 
from the departed, shows a wholy unscientific rev- 
erence for the medium, and the characteristically 
infantile attitude. 

i How I Know the Dead Exist, McClure's Magazine, Nov., 1920. 



198 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

But we know that the earliest feelings of the 
infant, even before the father has become the em- 
bodiment of omnipotence for him, are themselves 
feelings of absolute omnipotence. There is at the 
earliest stage of mental development nothing in the 
situation of any infant to furnish him any other 
ideas than that he possesses all the power in the 
world. He has but to utter an inarticulate cry, and 
to him come, apparently of their own accord, the 
gratifications of all the desires that he has. His 
internal sensations, if he is a healthy baby, are all 
those of reiterated satisfactions of wishes. He can 
do everything he wants. 

If in later years his greatest desire is to prove 
the existence of life after death, his omnipotence 
is complete as a baby's if he can get the same feel- 
ing of satisfaction from the thoughts he can think 
about this problem. It is- no wonder then that so 
many men's minds show this trend unconsciously 
even if consciously they deny it. Everything in 
their inner life tends that way, and it is hopeless 
to stop the drift of it all except by means of the 
principle of reality thinking which puts a stop to 
dreaming and makes an effort to find how things 
really are related to each other in the universe. 

Thus the apparent paradox of a person's attribut- 
ing omnipotence to another person in order to gain 
the same himself is apparent only. Unconsciously 
the spiritist identifies himself with the medium; 
and, the identification being both centripetal and 
extrinsic, he identifies the medium with the most 



THE MECHANISMS 199 

omnipotent being he conceived of in his infancy — 
his father. 

In the history of the individual spiritist, the de- 
velopment of the feeling of omnipotence appears- in 
three stages. First, as an infant he feels omnipo- 
tent himself, and with the best reasons in the world. 
Second, he learns there are limits to his own omni- 
potence, as he has one disappointment after an- 
other, as one after another of his wishes is frus- 
trated. If now the principle of reality thinking 
gains the ascendancy in his mind — an extremely 
rare happening, making the actual scientific man — 
he enters the third stage, and realizes the true rela- 
tion of himself to the external world, and that he 
and it are governed by exactly the same universal 
natural law. Otherwise he remains intellectually 
an infant. The fourth stage is where his pleasure- 
thinking overcomes him again, and he reinterprets 
reality according* to his wishes and yields little by 
little, as even great scientists have done, to the pres- 
sure of the unconscious. He sees " evidences " of 
survival naturally at the time of his life when 
some sort of survival has a peculiar desirability in 
his eyes, and in directing his gaze to the evidences 
he averts it necessarily from the facts of nature. 
Every instance when natural law, collated with so 
much energy by the aid of the reality principle, is 
broken through gives him one more bit of omni- 
potence, via the medium, and he re-lives as far as 
his thought mechanisms go, the second stage of his 
intellectual development, where his own omnipo 1 - 



200 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

tence has given way to the omnipotence of his far- 
ther. The only advance he can then make in this 
retrograde re-living is to attain the final or fifth 
stage, which is identical with the first, his corn* 
plete intellectual infancy and with it his feeling 
of absolute omnipotence. I cannot too strongly 
emphasize that the abandonment of the reality prin- 
ciple of thought is the first step leading inevitably 
toward second childhood, and the actions of men 
of intellect in turning toward spiritism is an un- 
failing indication of involution, whereupon they 
cease to be scientists, become first poets, then chil- 
dren and finally infants. 



CHAPTER VI 

UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 

By means of a purely intellectual process the as- 
sociation experiments of Jung develop in some per- 
sons a decided emotional conflict. From other re- 
searches of psychoanalysts too it is certain that 
these conflicts are in the unconscious of the indi- 
vidual and that the balance of power on one side 
or the other of the internal and unconscious strug- 
gle is the determining factor in the individual's 
choice of an occupation for his vocation or for his 
avocation. 

§ 1. The Conflict-Split Character 

Among spiritists we find those who make it their 
vocation to study in their own way the manifesta- 
tions of the unconscious conflict and those whose 
avocation is the same type of activity. But both 
are showing their preoccupation with a subject that 
has not yet received from science corroboration or 
authorization as a subject open to really scientific 
study. In short, they are studying ostensibly cer- 
tain phenomena; but psychoanalysis is, convinced 
that what they are really studying ifc, their own con- 
flicts caused by their death .complex. 

The conflict-spUt- character is a thing in itself, 
separa^g^n,tirely frqm the situation or environment; 

-./A;,, **v -.1 2()1 



202 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

in which it may be placed. For the character or 
disposition that contains an innate or acquired con- 
flict, or lack of balance, or uneven distribution of 
strain, there is naturally no external cure. Such 
a character is really worse than a man with a 
broken arm or leg or spine. But the significant 
fact is that ordinary medical examination fails to 
reveal any physical defect. The muscles, volun- 
tary and involuntary, in such an individual are 
tensed in such a way that they, and the organs they 
supply, do not perform their functions properly; 
but the tension itself comes not from the muscle 
but from the brain or nerves and ultimately from 
the ideas in the individual's mind. 

If an idea is only a part of the total and com- 
pletely inter-integrated unitary organism, it is it- 
self part of the effect which it itself causes. It is 
therefore part cause and part effect, and partakes 
of both qualities either one of which is generally re- 
garded as logically the contradictory of the other. 

§ 2. The Postural Tonus 

The name technically given to the numerous 
nerve impulses sent every second to the muscles, 
and to the effect produced by them there, is the 
" postural tonus." * It is the postural tonus that 
keeps one sitting or standing as a unit, wrinkles 
the brow in deep thought, diminishes or increases 
secretion of gastric juice, bile, pancreatic juice, etc. 
A redisposition of many muscular strains takes 

iKempf: The Autonomic Functions and the Personality. 1918. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 203 

place at any sudden change in the environment or 
at any greatly different idea causing a deep emo- 
tion. The idea causes the change in the postural 
tonus or distribution of muscular strains, and the 
conscious or unconscious perception of a part of 
these muscular strains constitutes the emotion it- 
self. 

All emotions are not the perception of the pos- 
tural tonus and all postural tonuses do not, when 
perceived, constitute emotions. An emotion is the 
perception of a change in the postural tonus of 
such an extent as to produce an effect. But the 
effect need not be one that enters consciousness. 
The effect must only be so minimally extensive that 
by some means it may later be known to have taken 
place. 

Therefore an emotion is but the result of a 
change. It is no state of mind or body or both, but 
is the dynamic alteration of some or all of the pos- 
tural tonuses that are continuously changing in the 
body. It is admitted that the body, whether awake 
or asleep, is never without postural tonuses. The 
only human body without postural tonus is a 
corpse. In fact the animal body may be described 
at any time as the algebraic sum of its postural 
tonuses, just as an atom is the result of the lines of 
force composing it. 

It would thus be said that the emotions, if they 
are not other than the changes of strains, must be 
continuous in the body. This indeed they are. 
Only when the changes become extensive enough 



204 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

greatly to agitate the body are they commonly 
called emotions. The perception of the change is 
the emotion. Some changes are not great enough 
to cause consciousness to awaken or if awake to 
turn to that particular part of the body where the 
change takes place. Other changes are so great as 
to awaken it or narrow it, at the same time focus- 
sing conscious attention on one element of the 
thought stream. Some are small and sudden, 
others are great and slow. The change in the pos- 
tural tonus caused by a sudden increase or decrease 
in the barometric pressure is recognizedly emo- 
tional in its nature. 

§ 3. Emotion a Change of Relation 

An emotion is either a perceived or an unper- 
ceived change in the relation between the external 
and internal ego. By far the greater majority of 
the changes in this relation are not consciously per- 
ceived. Any change of relation between external 
environment and internal disposition, requiring an 
adaptation of the body, and there are few which 
do not, immediately causes that adaptation; and 
only when the adaptation is of sufficient grossness 
does it penetrate into consciousness as a perception 
of the body in a state of turmoil (unpleasant) or 
excitement (pleasant). The adaptations to inter- 
nal and external conditions made by the blood, the 
blood vessels, the digestive and eliminative func- 
tions are all included^n the general adaptive activ- 
ity af^the.bodyj buitgenerally only the last named 



Unconscious emotions and Will 205 

enters consciousness to the extent of being pre- 
pared for in advance, voluntarily. Even this is an 
acquired conscious volition, demanded, as are all 
Others, by our being members of society. 

As the adaptive activity is universal, perennial, 
ceaseless, it will naturally occur that every activ- 
ity of the body might just as well be called an emo- 
tion as any other. But we do not call many violent 
activities emotions, although they are accompanied 
by consciously perceived excitement pervading the 
entire organism. Ball playing, tennis, boxing, polo 
playing, swimming, rowing, running, etc., are all 
violent exertions; but the reason they are not called 
emotions^ although they are highly elaborated 
adaptations, is that the sensations emanating from 
the internal organs of the body are not occupying 
the eentre of the field of conscious attention. 

The unconscious is hugely gratified by all this 
stirring life, but has succeeded for the moment in 
engaging the attention of the individual upon ex- 
ternals. While the inner excitement gained by 
outer activity is most pleasurable for the cave mam 
within us, blindly to exercise our muscles just for* 
pure muscle erotism does not interest conseiousr- 
ness. So we invent games in which there i& a small 
amount of abstraction to occupy consciousness and! 
make a compromise with the excitement-loving un- 
conscious, in that* we make our abstractions apply/ 
to large movements of the body instead of to infin- 
itesimal movements^ or their equivalent, of the 
brain and nerve substance. 



206 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

The sensations emanating from the internal or- 
gans, heart, lungs, viscera, stomach, even the skin, 
are much more noticeable when the body is at rest. 
Therefore it is possible that a person leading an 
inactive life will lead a much more emotional one, 
than a person who leads an active life. This ap- 
plies to a life that uses up the libido in outward 
activity, such as that of a day labourer or farmer 
of the old school. There are many occupations, 
such as that of the sailor, in fine weather, where the 
conditions are such that a vigorous physique is de- 
veloped and is left without adequate outlet, and 
with many hours of enforced idleness, wherein the 
emotions, or sensations from certain parts of the 
body itself, become unduly prominent. 

From this point of view the doctrine of the Stoics 
that emotions are diseases is easily appreciated. 
They are more reasonably called diseases if they are 
not the subsidiary accompaniment of an activity 
directed toward the external world, but are the 
object of direct voluntary attention. 

The emotions that are repressed, or dammed 
back, are distinctly not merely subsidiary concom- 
itants of outgoing activity but are the centre of 
conscious attention, for a while at least, and are 
then choked down, and put out of consciousness; 
that is, they have to be attended to in order to be 
dammed back. 

We may profitably consider the conditions in 
which emotions themselves become the centre of 
conscious attention. Natural animal reaction is 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 207 

an external reaction in most animals except those 
that feign death to escape an enemy; and in the 
opposite situation, namely of sex activity, the ac- 
tions are universally physical embracing the entire 
physique of the animal. In the animal world the 
only restraint laid upon reaction to environment 
comes from without, and in the shape of fear in- 
spired by present or anticipated injury. 

§ 4. Repression 

In the human race restraint is similarly initiated 
though not carried out in the same manner in every 
case. We may easily imagine a situation in which 
a child is forced by circumstances to repress its 
activity that constitutes the instinctive reaction to 
an unpleasing environment. He tries to run away, 
but is held back. He tries to strike the object un- 
pleasing to him, but is held fast by a stronger child 
or adult. In this situation struggling gives him a 
partial relief but not a wholly satisfactory one. 

We may also easily imagine an individual so 
constituted as to react not outwardly but in- 
wardly. He will be praised for it, very early in 
life. He will be such a good little boy and no 
trouble to any one. And he may grow up into such 
a good little man, that he will make the finest kind 
of tool for the constitutional trouble-maker to use 
for his own purposes. 

But here, as ever, the advantage to society is a 
disadvantage to the individual, though we might 
see in the multiplication of such individuals a de- 



208 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

terioration of society itself. Everything points to 
the detrimental nature of any repression of emo- 
tion whatsoever. If we cannot express ourselves 
because of the squeamishness of our social environ- 
ment, so much the worse for it. The strength of a 
fabric is measured by what it can stand. The 
wholesomeness of social relations is detracted from 
by the inability to hear a man or woman give vent 
to their feelings within reasonable limits. But 
the sensitive type of people, who identify them- 
selves vividly with others, those of the artistic tem- 
perament are likely to restrain themselves too 
much. Hear what Ludwig Frank 1 says in his 
Affektstorungen about the neurotic type: 

" Through their increased memory capacity they 
also have the ability easily to reproduce, with the 
original emotional tone, what they have lived 
through. In social life such people are distin- 
guished for their vivacity; they are easily trans- 
ported by the stories of others, still more, for ex- 
ample, by their own special favourite literature and 
by the theatre. Furthermore, they are enabled, by 
relating their own experiences and the emotions 
released, to interest or even transport other people. 
It is generally the lively and ingenious persons in 
society, with many-sided, especially artistic, inter- 
ests, who very soon make an impression by their 
engaging manners. They are not the ordinary peo- 
ple with the herd instinct. The interesting qual- 
ity of their minds stamps them as having the artis- 

i A Freudian of Zurich. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 209 

tic nature. All psychoneurotics are either them- 
selves artists or dilettantes or they have a special 
understanding in every sphere of art. This is ren- 
dered possible by the intensity of their emotional 
life. ... If such people remain healthy — for hap- 
pily in only a small number of people so disposed 
is a psychoneurosis reached — they have an ex- 
traordinary importance for their fellow-men. For 
they understand how to get enjoyment out of life 
in a very high degree, and to beautify it for others." 

§ 5. Repression and Conflict 

An act that has to be carried out by a person who 
is virtually a mechanism half or more than half, of 
which is operating against, or not entirely with the 
rest of it, is an act that is associated with unpleas- 
ant emotions. The unpleasant emotions are the 
organic reactions, whether sub-perceived or apper- 
ceived, and the organic reactions have various ef- 
fects upon the physical mechanism. One of these 
effects is the increase of the supply of adrenalin 
sent to the blood, another the increase of glycogen. 
Other effects are correlative with these such as the 
exudation, and the closing of the ducts supplying 
moisture to the mouth and throat. Blushing is an- 
other organic reaction clearly connected with ideas. 
The organic reactions need not be situated or show 
themselves in the face or in the intestinal organs 
solely. They exist everywhere in the body. 

The functioning of the entire mind and body as 
a whole, whose integrity has never been impaired 



210 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

in harmoniousness, is a phenomenon seen only in 
the young — in infants and in very young children. 
In them, if they be not organically defective to start 
with, each act is accompanied by the ideas and 
emotions that have evolved as the inevitable result 
of millennia of evolution. The only thing that can 
stop a perfectly harmonious continuation of this 
interplay of parts of the organism as a totality is 
some unfortunate experience. What is unfortu- 
nate varies with the complexity of the organism. 
A crab may lose a claw and grow another; a man 
losing an arm remains not only physically but 
mentally one armed. 

The perfectly harmonious functioning of the body 
ceases when the reactions naturally caused by the 
environment are in some way blocked. Among the 
blocked processes are the emotions, some of which 
in every civilized adult are thus inhibited. The in- 
hibited emotions or those whose expression is 
blocked become unconscious emotions. That they 
cease being emotions by virtue of being blocked is 
only another way of saying they are turned from 
conscious into unconscious emotions. Their status 
as unconscious emotions, while being admitted by 
some, is on technical grounds denied. 

" Unless an unconscious excitation or wish suc- 
ceeds in getting the thing-ideas representing it 
translated into word-ideas (but not necessarily into 
actual words), or, to express it differently, unless 
in the foreconscious the word-memory residues are 
activated which correspond to the unconscious idea- 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 211 

tional representatives of the wish, it remains an 
unconscious or repressed one. Its energy develops 
neither affects, nor movement. " 

" There are no unconscious affects. One often 
speaks, to be sure, of unconscious affects (love, 
hate, guilt, resentment, etc. ) and this usage, though 
not strictly correct, is a legitimate clinical con- 
venience. An affect is really a conscious sensory 
perception of a bodily state. Without conscious- 
ness it does not exist. When we speak of an 
unconscious affect we mean either that the affect 
is really developed and therefore conscious, though 
attached to some other ideas than those originally 
representing it, or else we mean merely a poten- 
tiality of its development — the tensions of the Un- 
conscious that might develop as affects of hate, love, 
etc., if released from foreconscious inhibition." * 

In this and similar passages there is implied a 
real though latent (unconscious) wish-energy con- 
nected in the unconscious with ideas which never 
emerge into consciousness. The fact, however, that 
a wish can, indeed every wish does, produce a sen- 
sory perception does not seem to some persons to 
suggest that an internal sensation may exist with- 
out causing a coenesthetic perception. The so- 
called common sensations, hunger, thirst, lust, diz- 
ziness, nausea, etc., are just as truly the effect of 
physical stimuli of the peripheral sensory or- 
gans situated in different parts of the body as the 
actual conscious affects or emotions are the 

i Frink : Morbid Fears and Compulsions, page 145. 



212 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

" conscious sensory perception of a bodily state." 
If there must be a physical basis for a wish, and 
if that wish is entering consciousness in more or less 
disguised form every hour of the day, there must 
also be a physical basis for emotions, quite as 
much when they are not, as when they are, in con- 
sciousness. If these states of the body are not con- 
sciously perceived every hour of the day, their not 
being perceived is no proof of their non-existence. 
Therefore saying that " there are really no con- 
scious affects " (emotions) is no more denying the 
existence of their physical substrate when they do 
not exist in consciousness than saying a wish does 
not enter consciousness in its original form denies 
the existence, in the unconscious, of that original 
form. 

And if emotions do not continuously appear in 
consciousness, there is no more reason to suppose 
that their physical substrate does not exist in the 
body in the interim between their several mani- 
festations than there is reason to suppose that the 
original wish idea which is kept securely locked 
in the unconscious, does not exist in a very definite 
form which by means of the appropriate psycho- 
analytic technique may be evoked and live in con- 
sciousness. 

§ 6. Emotion Unceasing 

An emotion therefore is a part of the total re- 
action of the organism to its environment. It is a 
never-ending reaction. We have no more reason to 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 213 

say that any part of the body is at any time en- 
tirely without change than we have to say that the 
heart does not beat during sleep. 

A conscious emotion is only a part of the total 
reaction of the organism to the environment. It is 
only a part simply because for ages man has singled 
out certain parts of the reaction that were per- 
ceptible to him and has given them this name. The 
emotional reaction is only a part of the total re- 
action simply because there have, in the history of 
mankind, been reasons for singling out certain por- 
tions of the total reaction. The reasons are that 
these portions were strikingly associated with the 
other senses of sight, sound, etc. How man felt to 
himself when he was terribly excited, has always 
been a strong sensation, and likewise how other peo- 
ple looked, sounded and " touched " or " felt " to 
him, when he was not excited and they were, and 
also when he was excited as well as they. These 
are all different groups of qualities of conscious- 
ness. From a purely objective point of view there 
is no reason for picking out one set of organic re- 
actions to the total mental and physical situation 
and calling it an emotion, except its strikingness 
and the resultant desire to talk about it. 

History has shown that men have done little 
of value with the emotions. Early in the history of 
systematic thought the Stoics came to the conclu- 
sion that the emotions were diseases or sufferings 
and that name in Greek (patheia) was given to 
them. The Stoic discipline was purposed to school 



214 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

men out of this suffering, much as Christian Sci- 
ence today attempts to annul diseases. The Stoics 
aimed at the opposite of patheia, which is apatheia 
(apathy) or absence of suffering. 

Thus an important group of thinkers early made 
a study, according to their opportunities, of the 
group of organic reactions now called emotions, but 
then called sufferings, and later passions (which is 
the Latin equivalent for patheia) ; and came to a 
conclusion concerning them analogous, in some re- 
spects, to the dicta of the Christian Scientists. 
" You should annihilate your emotions," said the 
Stoics, " because they are never good but only ill." 
" You must verbally annihilate disease by a per- 
petual negative affirmation that disease is a nega- 
tion, because it is not health, and therefore does 
not exist/' say the Christian Scientists. 

Neither the Stoics with their repression, nor the 
Christian Scientists with their negative affirmation 
both touching partial reactions of the organism to 
its total environment, saw the truth in full. It is 
interesting to note in this connection what a mod- 
ern psychology of the unconscious has discovered 
about the people who do now what the Stoics were 
advised to do 2500 years ago. The person who re- 
presses his emotions, gains a control over certain 
functions of his body, certain glands (for example 
the tear glands and others) and the muscular con- 
trol over the face, a control which is exactly con- 
trary to the natural working of these parts. In a 
sense he thus gives a permanent twist to his psy- 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 215 

chophysical organism. What even a twisted or- 
ganism can accomplish is a wonder. In trees it is 
even a picturesque quality. 

What the twist in the personality accomplished 
by stoicism did for the individual was to make him 
more adaptable to the purposes of the state, as it 
restrained his activity so that it should not be in- 
jurious to other individuals, this being one of the 
aims of society. 

§ 7. Emotion and Health 

In health the proper functioning of the various 
bodily organs generally does not enter conscious- 
ness directly. Some people glory in the fact that 
they never know they have a stomach except when 
they are hungry. But the indirect results of the 
well-working organs appear in consciousness as the 
emotional tone of the day's experiences. A dys- 
peptic teacher will not see the pupils as they are 
but as little devils. And even the children suspect 
that the psychic atmosphere of the school room that 
results from the gastric disturbance is due to the 
teacher's not feeling well. The bodily changes in 
hunger, rage, and fear have been so well described 
by Cannon that it is unnecessary to more than re- 
fer to them here. Is the fear the result of the 
bodily change or does the bodily change cause the 
fear? 

Psychoanalytic research has shown that a fear 
may have various and far-reaching physical as well 
as mental results and that the fear in question is 



216 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

not proven to be of other than psychic origin. 
Furthermore a specific fear such as that of dogs, 
tunnels, snakes, thunderstorms, open places, closed 
places, etc., may be only a conscious phase of an 
unconscious fear that concerns something far more 
intimate than what appears on the surface. The 
actual thing consciously feared is almost never an 
adequate cause for the amount of emotion evoked. 
The fear of the patient must really be of something 
far more vital. The fear of thunderstorms is ut- 
terly disproportionate to the amount of emotion 
that would be commensurate with the facts of mor- 
tality in thunderstorms as shown by the theory of 
probabilities. It is as if the unconscious had to 
have for its own satisfaction an approximate 
amount of internal excitement, and, failing to get 
that out of the ordinary run of human experience 
fixed upon some more or less frequently occurring 
phenomenon. Similarly the psychical researchers, 
each and every one of them, have failed to get out 
of life the normal emotional reaction and have de- 
voted their energy toward consciously carrying out 
measures to still their unconscious fears. 

§ 8. Fear 

Freud points out that for the individual the 
prime fearsome experience is the very act of being 
born, and that Macduff was without fear because 
he was not naturally born of woman, but from his 
" mother's womb untimely ripp'd." Should we call 
this fear implanted in mankind at birth, a physical 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 217 

or a mental fear? As the majority of humans are 
naturally born and yet develop some fear attached 
haphazard to various human experiences we should 
have to say that it is mental fear, or fear of having 
an exclusively psychic origin. And yet it is a fear 
that is caused at a time when the individual has 
never been fully conscious. It is a fear that in its 
origin is and, in later existence remains, uncon- 
scious, a generic apprehensiveness attachable after- 
ward to any sort of experience whatever, whether 
such experience is objectively dangerous or not. 

And, on the other hand, how many are the really 
dangerous situations that do not cause the least 
fear in men and women! The ravages of certain 
diseases according to the absolute objective facts 
of their mortality, should, if humans reasoned 
logically, be the object of the most active fear and 
be attacked with relentless energy. But either the 
collective unconscious of the communities or races 
decimated by these diseases gets a satisfaction out 
of the excitement caused by them or the conscious 
mentality of the groups is not logical or clear 
enough to see the connection. Only at some distant 
time in the future when the conscious minds of 
men and women reckon with the unconscious, will 
the multitudinous specific fears be recognized as 
illogical and steps taken to remove as far as pos- 
sible from the external situation the really danger- 
ous factors. 

Among the dangerous factors of the present day 
psychical and physical situation the most danger- 



218 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ous of all is the ignorance, and the unwillingness 
of men to become cognizant, of the part that is 
played by the unconscious in the every day life of 
humanity, both normal and abnormal men. This 
ignorance is natural enough on account of the com- 
paratively recent discovery of the main facts. The 
unwillingness to become aware of the function of 
the unconscious is due to quite other causes. 
The greatest of these is the apparently unpleasant 
nature of the concept, which is that of an almost 
unlimited power, misdirected and at first glance 
seeming immoral, or at least unmoral, and incon- 
gruous with the aims of society as generally under- 
stood, in spite of the fact that the perversion of this 
power is not its only possible employment. It can 
just as well be socially used as asocially deflected 
from the external world to the internal world of 
the individual. Just now the world is suffering 
from a too great release of energy begun in the 
world war, and not yet directed into channels of 
usefulness to humanity at large. 

§ 9. Will 

To some person " unconscious will " is only a 
misnomer because they consider that the act of will- 
ing, in the only possible way in which it could be 
regarded as free will, must be conscious. Con- 
scious will alone implies an individual personality 
that can deliberate for the ego and make free ra- 
tional choice, or come to a decision as to what con- 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 219 

stitutes alternatives. In this respect we grant all 
that is required by the advocates of free will. As 
far as consciousness is concerned there must be 
only conscious mental activity, and it would be in- 
consistent and contradictory to speak of an uncon- 
scious will. 

The will is free to choose between two ideas, but 
it is not directly free to choose what ideas shall be 
presented. It may, for example, occur to me to go 
to one place or to another, and I exercise my free- 
dom of conscious will in picking which place to 
go. But why were these two of the many places 
I might go offered to my conscious mind by my 
unconscious mind? That is a matter which does 
not come within the scope of my conscious freedom 
of will. 

In this respect I, as a totality of conscious and 
unconscious activities am not at present a free 
agent if ever I was at any time. I may approach 
freedom as a limit, mathematically speaking, if I 
begin now to take my unconscious in hand and train 
it to utter its wealth of mental resources more 
freely. The repression of such vast mental mate 
rial into the unconscious of every person is what 
really prevents his wi 1 ! from being free. His will 
is bound only because his mind is not free, because 
it is, in other words, so largely unconscious. The 
differences in men and women in this respect are 
easily observable. Not the effusive talker, nor yet 
the insistent worker along one line, is the freest, 



220 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

<r 

but that individual whose physical and mental ac- 
tivities have the widest scope, the fewest inhibitions 
both conscious and unconscious. 

§ 10. Will and Emotion 

The clearest possible illustration of the uncon- 
scious mental activity is furnished by the cases in 
which a person is going about his business in the 
routine way and suddenly faces an unexpected sit- 
uation for which he is prepared neither by mental 
training nor by experience. He becomes discon- 
certed and does some foolish thing. " Conscious- 
ness," to use the words of Angell, 1 " cannot in- 
stantly adapt itself to the new situation and in the 
meantime the motor energy overflows in what we 
call the expressions of emotion." He has described 
the expressions of emotion ( on p. 321 ) as follows : 
" The moment the stimulus takes on an emotional 
hue, however, as we have just seen, the guidance 
of consciousness is more or less abridged." This 
illustrates the difference between the point of view 
of mental life as consciousness only, and as both 
conscious and unconscious together. When the 
guidance of consciousness is abridged, what hap- 
pens is the entrance into consciousness of a mass 
of organic sensations that were in the unconscious 
just before. 

Angell goes on to say that " the only alternative 
is an overflow of the nervous currents into the in- 
voluntary pathways and the instinctive hereditary 

1 Psychology, page 322. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 221 

pathways of the voluntary system." But from the 
analytic point of view it seems that what happens 
here is not an overflow of conscious activity intoj 
involuntary (unconscious) pathways, but an irrup- 
tion of what before were unconscious perceptions, 
an irruption of these unconscious factors into con- 
sciousness, a sudden activation of processes that 
had just before been quiescent, or latent. 

Further he says, " Any situation is emotional in 
which an impediment to the ongoing activity is en- 
countered so serious as to break up the progress of 
the consciously directed co-ordinations occurring at 
the moment." 

This is another example of a merely one-sided 
view. Any situation is emotional which arouses 
the internal sensation to such a pitch that although 
ordinarily they are outside of or below conscious- 
ness, now, at these special times, they force them- 
selves upon consciousness, breaking down all bars 
which consciousness (and conscious psychology) 
have erected against them. Of course " breaking 
up the progress of the consciously directed co- 
ordinations occurring at the moment " is a nasty 
thing to do, particularly if one is gripping tight the 
narrow seat of consciousness and expecting it to 
control everything in sight, which would indeed be 
a foolish expectation. 

Angell continues the same sentence ; ( an impedi- 
ment to the ongoing activity is encountered) " of a 
character requiring a definitely new adaptive re- 
action of consciousness in order to surmount it." 



222 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

According to current psychology the " ongoing ac- 
tivity " is exclusively consciousness, no recognition 
being made of the unconscious perception feeling 
and willing going on simultaneously and constitu- 
ting by far the most extensive field of mental action. 
The notion, too, that " a definitely new adaptive re- 
action of consciousness " is requisite, is evidently 
purely a one-sided view. No reaction can be con- 
scious. The reaction is a fact of the unconscious 
mentality and a part of it enters consciousness and 
never or rarely all of the reaction. On the other 
hand the mind-body combination, regardless of con- 
sciousness or unconsciousness, is adaptively react- 
ing all the time whether we wake or sleep. Some 
of these processes or movements enter conscious- 
ness, others do not. 

He practically admits as much in his next sen- 
tence : " The case represents in a way the very con- 
ditions under which we found consciousness first 
coming to light " (in the evolution of animate life) . 
Consciousness is the attainment of a certain degree 
of complexity of organization. 

" Consciousness cannot instantly adapt itself to 
the new situation, and in the meantime the motor 
energy overflows in what we call the expressions of 
emotion." This would be restated, with the uncon- 
scious activity in view, in some such way as that 
consciousness does not need to adapt itself in- 
stantly to any new situation as the adaptation is 
the work of the unconscious largely. In fact on 
occasions of violent emotion consciousness is so 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 223 

completely occupied with organic sensations or 
with some special external sense that the rest of 
the visual, auditory and other qualities are ex- 
cluded from consciousness and make such slight im- 
pressions that the memory of them is generally 
permanently an unconscious memory. At such 
times a narrowing of the visual and auditory con- 
sciousness takes place which results in something 
like a veil being drawn over the emotional episode, 
or over a part of the visual, auditory, tactual, etc., 
impressions. By the " instinctive hereditary path- 
ways of the voluntary system " being thus over- 
flowed by the emotion he evidently means just what 
I have called the internal sensations. 

The fact that this internal sensation irradiates 
along the pathways of the voluntary system, which 
at the time are deprived of conscious control, sug- 
gests two important considerations. The first is 
that the so-called voluntary muscles are not always 
under voluntary control, that is, they are some- 
times, as in strong emotions, under the control, if it 
may be called control, of the unconscious. The sec- 
ond is that the emotion itself is much more uncon- 
scious than conscious, no matter how strong it may 
be. The stronger it is, the more vivid the light 
which is focussed, not on the diversity of sources of 
feeling, which are exceedingly numerous, but chiefly 
on some one sense element of sight or sound or 
touch, which for a brief time looms so large in con- 
sciousness as to obscure all other sensations. 

It is only as the Internal disturbance dies down 



224 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

that one usually recalls the physical elements that 
composed it. Whatever actions may have been per- 
formed are recalled only later, if at all. Activity 
was almost entirely unconscious at the time of the 
greatest intensity of emotion, and it is frequently 
either completely forgotten or the memories of it 
are hopelessly distorted. This is proved by the un- 
reliability of the testimony of excited witnesses. 
Only the unemotional observer can recall correctly 
the details of any incident causing great emotion 
in the persons most concerned. Those most excited 
are most unconscious and have least free will. 
Their actions are under the control of that part of 
their personality — their unconscious — which is 
not directly subject to the will. 

In view of the fact that the unconscious comprises 
so large, and consciousness so small, a part of the 
entire personality, of the individual, it is thus clear 
why we are only to a very slight degree interested 
in the freedom of the will and why unconscious 
volition is not a topic to be treated at great length 
under this title. As libido it would fill a library 
of volumes. 

§ 11. Images and Will 

I have called the conscious voluntary visual rep- 
resentation a visual mental image. I might thus 
speak of images as auditory, olfactory, gustatory, 
cutaneous and thermal, kinesthetic and organic 
sense qualities. There are some who deny the ex- 
istence of these separate representations but those 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 225 

who have observed them in themselves, or believe 
they have, are united on the possibility of having 
all these types of imagery in consciousness, with 
the possible exception of organic and pain and 
pleasure. 

There is no doubt that auditory impressions are 
spontaneously represented to consciousness, in 
other words that there are auditory " memory 
images " and they come without any feeling what- 
soever of being willed, desired or wished for. It 
is one of the commonest of occurrences to have a 
tune " running through " one's head. These tunes 
come of their own accord, and while they may, ap- 
parently, be voluntarily continued and varied, their 
actual presence at the time of their first coming 
cannot be accounted for as an act of will. 

This fact suggests that visual, olfactory, and 
other classes of images are, as a matter of fact, 
quite as much beyond voluntary recall as are the 
spontaneously occurring tunes I have just men- 
tioned. And if the other classes of images are be- 
yond voluntary recall, surely the images of internal 
sensations, if such exist, as some believe, must be 
quite as spontaneous. If, furthermore, we realize 
that the internal sensations are always presenta- 
tions whenever they enter consciousness, it is nec- 
essary to admit that they are no more subject to 
the will, in the ordinary sense, than any other pre- 
sentation. 

Remembering, however, that will is itself the per- 
ception of an internal sensation, we realize that a 



226 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

voluntary recall of an idea (representation) is but 
the occurrence of that idea, in association with the 
volitional feeling, and that the recalling of an emo- 
tion voluntarily would be only the spontaneous oc- 
currence of that emotion, accompanied by the feel- 
ing of having willed it, which is itself a spontane- 
ous internal sensation. So, too, would the image of 
an emotion, if the term be allowed, and the thing 
believed as possible, be but the spontaneous emer- 
gence of the representation of the emotion, accom- 
panied also by the volitional feeling, or internal 
sensation which is the unconscious basis of it. 

§ 12. Recalling a Name 

Possibly the part which volition plays in evoking 
these various representations may be clearer if we 
take the illustration of trying to recall a name. 
In this instance it is as if we were trying to fill a 
hole with something which would just fit it. Fur- 
thermore it is very much like filling a hole we can- 
not see, for if we could see it, we should see its 
shape, and seeing the shape of the holes the letters 
would fit into would be as easy as reading a name 
in a stencil. But while we cannot see this stencil, 
we are immediately aware of the fact, when the 
letters of the stencil which we cannot see, are filled 
with the letters we can see. This is a very extraor- 
dinary situation, and makes it quite evident that 
the knowledge of the filling out of these letters 
must be gained from a sense other than sight. Or 
we could say the same thing about sound. If the 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 227 

actual name were not written or printed each time, 
but spoken by ourselves or some one else, there 
would still be the sense of sameness, which is no 
part of the auditory quality, but is a sensation of 
another quality, and the same sense as operated in 
connection with the visual sensations. 

When I wish to recall the name of another per- 
son who has done or said some special thing or been 
seen by me on some special occasion, I begin run- 
ning over several names in my mind, particularly 
those beginning with a certain letter, which I think 
is the initial of the required name. Not infre- 
quently I am mistaken in this. I go over name 
after name, the words coming at will (i. e., accom- 
panied by a feeling of volition) until they stop 
coming. Then there is an awkward pause. I feel 
at a loss. As far as names go, my mind is a blank. 
Then, if after a minute or two of blankness another 
name occurs to me, I feel that it has come of its own 
accord, and although I was trying to think of the 
name Parker, Preston appeared. How much was 
Preston recalled at will? Not at all. I was exert- 
ing all the will-power I had in order to recall 
Parker. I was not willing Preston at all. Can 
Preston truly be said to have come through any vol- 
untary effort on my part? No more can Parker, 
even though it comes as the next name. 

When then can I be said to be willing? Names 
in general that begin with P. But if I have been 
honest with myself, and have put down on paper 
or have spoken out all the names and all the ideas 



228 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

which have come into my mind, I must confess that 
other names than those beginning with P have oc- 
curred to me, also other thoughts than mere names 
I have selected. I have, as it were, shut my eyes 
or my lips to all names beginning with any other let- 
ter, and to all other mental occurrences not names, 
in spite of which some did nevertheless leak 
through. 

This narrowing of consciousness for selective 
purposes blinds us to what is going on in the part 
of the mind screened out by our name-selecting 
mechanism. But this takes place in every kind of 
directed thinking, which is merely selected think- 
ing, screened, bolted, sifted, sieved, with a fine wire 
gauze netting, adjusted to the exact size of what 
we want to cull out of sense experience in general 
or out of its representations or mental imagery. 

In this recalling-of-a-name situation we are sit- 
ting with a screen, this time in the shape of a sten- 
cil, in our hands, and are waiting until some name 
shall come along that fits exactly. But this implies 
a greater willingness than usual to allow names to 
fly through our heads. In being thus disposed to 
entertain names at random we are opening our con- 
scious mind to a flood of representations which 
emerge from the unconscious. At these times we 
open the gates wider to ideas and feelings from the 
unconscious, and the ideas and feelings come in 
infinite numbers, and, for the time being, we take 
those that fit our special stencil, and ignore all the 
rest. But if we knew how to observe, compare and 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 229 

study the rest, we should be learning something 
about the contents of the unconscious. 

We are thus both opening and closing our mind 
at the same time, — opening it to allow the flow of 
more representations through it than Ave generally 
allow, and in a sense closing it to avoid looking at, 
or becoming aware of, almost all that we have other- 
wise admitted. We admit such ideas into con- 
sciousness in a sort of negative way, dismissing 
them at once if they do not fulfil a certain require- 
ment. If one of them does fulfil it, we accept it at 
once and dismiss its entire train of followers. 

While this is of course most business-like and 
most practical from the point of view of finding the 
name Parker, it very much resembles antiquated 
methods of manufacture where 80 per cent, to 90 
per cent, of the raw product was thrown away to 
clutter the earth or pollute streams. But as mod- 
ern industrial economics progresses, we find some 
use for more and more of the by-products. 

Kegarding the series of names of people begin- 
ning with P as raw material out of which I wished 
to extract only the name Parker to keep, and fling 
a hundred away, I can regard in turn all names be- 
ginning with P as the material that is to be ex- 
tracted from a still greater raw material, say fam- 
ily names in general. I recall all the family names 
I can, and keep only those beginning with P. Or 
I can enlarge my scope still farther and, allowing 
all sorts of representations to come to my conscious- 
ness, record only such of them as are family names. 



230 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

Finally I can remove all restrictions whatever, 
and write, if I can write fast enough, or tell some 
other person, or even silently review, any and all 
ideas which come to consciousness. In this posi- 
tion of having removed all selective machinery from 
my mind I am in a position of observing the " free 
associations" by the psychoanalytic method of 
mental investigation. 

If it is said that when we are looking for the 
name Parker and cannot find it, we are surely will- 
ing Parker, and the same for names beginning with 
P, with family names in general and so on till we 
get to the free associations utterly unrestricted, it 
might be asked what it was that caused us to will 
to remember the name Parker. 

It was evidently some special value that Parker 
had for us at that particular time, — a special value 
that made us want it or wish for it above all other 
names, and quite unconnected with the familiar 
wishing for things just because at the time we have 
them not. 

The special wish value that is possessed by a 
name, even when it is out of consciousness is an ex- 
ceedingly peculiar thing. Contradictory as it may 
appear, the name Parker, which we were wishing 
for, is for a time kept out of consciousness by the 
fact that there is behind it a strong wish against its 
coming into consciousness. 

This shows quite clearly how we are at variance 
with ourselves even when we are trying to recall a 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 231 

name. Curiously we wish the name but it is not 
forthcoming. Unconsciously there is a strong force 
dragging the name into oblivion, a force which we 
consciously oppose, at the same time getting the 
feeling of willing, which is due to the opposition set 
up by the unconscious. 

This condition of being at variance with ourselves 
constitutes what has been called the unconscious 
conflict. In this case it is only partly unconscious. 
The struggle to recover the name Parker is quite 
conscious, as are all the means employed to drag 
the name from oblivion. But we are fishing with 
lines let down into the invisible depths of the soul, 
baiting our hooks and waiting for whatever name- 
fishes may bite and be hauled up. The amount of 
" volition " is just the number of internal sensa- 
tions associated with the amount of fish-line that 
we put out and the number of times we do it. 

What we catch is in no sense to be called the 
effect of our conscious volition, but it is the effect of 
what might be called an unconscious volition. The 
two are ostensibly very different, although there is 
no reason to believe that they are not essentially 
the same, with the exception that one of them does 
not appear above the horizon and come into con- 
sciousness. 

Save in extensiveness or expansiveness the sense 
of volition or feeling of willing is no other than the 
internal sensation concomitant with a wish or de- 
sire. It occurs both in consciousness and in the 



232 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

unconscious, whence it sometimes does and some- 
times does not, manifest itself in literal or in sym- 
bolic forms. 

§ 13. Freedom of the Will 

When people disagree about whether or not the 
human will is free, they disagree only because they 
do not see that consciously the will is free in that 
we know what we are doing, though we do not know 
all of its significance ; but if freedom of the will de- 
pends on a choice of what ideas are behind the 
willed action, the will is not free in the same 
sense, for we have no direct conscious control over 
what ideas shall come into the mind. 

One would naturally say that unconsciously the 
will is not free, or that the unconscious will is not 
free, because it is without the control of the con- 
scious mind, and this is in a sense true. So when 
we argue about the freedom of the will, it should be 
asked : Do you mean conscious will or do you mean 
unconscious trends? 

§ 14. The Unconscious Will 

The unconscious processes, movements, repre- 
sentations are all directed toward consciousness 
and attain that proximity to consciousness depend- 
ent upon the amount of activation energy which 
they represent. This activation energy is what 
might be called the unconscious will, and is gen- 
erally to be regarded as a will to expression, or a 
wish to be expressed, in conscious thought, — a 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 233 

wish that is gratified in some cases only to the ex- 
tent that it becomes an overt action, although that 
action may be one which does not enter the con- 
sciousness of the person making it, an example 
being any unconscious mannerism, such as biting 
lips, various pursings of them, twisting of hands, 
etc. 

The removal of all restrictions upon thought is a 
difficult task for most persons, and for a number of 
reasons. First it is considered by some a waste of 
time, by others meaningless, by still others, who are 
mentally timorous, a terrifying experience, for they 
may happen to come upon thoughts of death, and 
representations of funerals and corpses and coffins 
and graveyards. Others, too, if they let themselves 
think in this unrestricted manner, would find many 
unhappy thoughts coming into their consciousness, 
thoughts of disappointments, of chagrin, of hate or 
animosity against others, and some individuals 
would have a sense of guilt aroused in them by im- 
aginations of a sensual character which would 
arouse desires they fear to gratify. 

Indeed, I believe that fear is the main reason that 
prevents most men from looking thus at their own 
unconscious minds, from letting many thoughts 
come into consciousness at all. I am sure that an 
instinctive fear prevented me from going deeper 
into my own unconscious, until I realized that it 
was just like any one's else and by knowing mine 
I could the more readily account for the other fel- 
low's. 



234 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

I am not recommending to all persons without 
exception this procedure of admitting to conscious- 
ness and recording the multitudinous thoughts in- 
carnadine that throng the unconscious stream, if 
the ordinary weirs be removed for a short time; 
although I believe that such a procedure would, in 
many cases, be followed by salutary results. The 
thoughts that enter through these opened gates 
which most men keep locked and barred are real 
thoughts, no matter how seldom they are allowed 
through. They are working parts of the mental 
mechanism, even though as invisible as the works 
of a watch. 

I offer, however, the suggestion that in one sense 
we are all required, for our own peace of mind, to 
know something about this mental mechanism that 
is out of sight, because not only are we forced our- 
selves to repair it and adjust it, if it requires repair 
or adjustment, but there are practically no mental 
watchmakers to do it for us, if we should desire it. 
As I believe, every clergyman, teacher, physician 
or employer of large numbers of men ought to be 
able to examine in this way and advise their parish- 
ioners, pupils, patients and employes, but it is no- 
torious that most of them do not, simply because 
they do not realize the importance of this generally 
neglected part of the mental machine. If the watch 
tells the time reasonably well, they use it, otherwise 
they throw it away. But it is an economic waste of 
vast proportion to reject the mental timepieces that 
do not mark time in the conventional manner. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 235 

In the study of spiritualistic phenomena, how- 
ever, this research into the unconscious is abso- 
lutely imperative. For, as stated before, we can- 
not pretend to make any true statements about 
something of which we know little or nothing. We 
cannot know anything adequate about spirit apart 
from body until we know something about spirit 
during its residence in the body ; and I submit that 
such knowledge is at present in a most elementary 
stage of its development and that it is above all 
things premature to say that any statement about a 
spirit apart from the body has any scientific value 
whatever. 

In another section I shall try to show how im- 
possible it is to say we know about disembodied 
spirit without a fuller knowledge of the uncon- 
scious than we have at present, and I shall offer 
what I consider to be an absolute essential to sci- 
entific research along spiritistic lines, namely the 
thorough analysis both of medium and of observers. 

§ 15. Summary 

Having defined an act as a voluntary movement 
or connected group of movements, it becomes nec- 
essary to give a meaning to the word voluntary. 
An act is that movement with which is associated a 
presentation consisting of an organic feeling of de- 
sire involving a gratification of some egocentric 
wish. The act is called voluntary if it is accom- 
panied by that organic sensation; it is called in- 
voluntary, if it is not. That is the only difference. 



236 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

What we most energetically will to do is what we 
conceive and that is at the same time supported by 
the organic sensations constituting desire. Where 
this supporting desire is absent, the act can in no 
sense be called voluntary. 

It is quite customary to speak of doing what we 
do not desire to do, and that through sheer force 
of will. But it is inaccurate to speak thus. For 
in doing what we dislike or even fear to do, there 
is a strong conflict between two conscious desires 
and probably many more unconscious ones. But 
that desire, which causes us to do what we do, is 
dynamically the stronger of the two, and the con- 
scious aim, as against the conscious or unconscious 
wishes opposing it, is for a greater good than could 
be attained by following the path of so-called desire, 
as opposed to sheer will. 

In the sense of a power unsupported by desire, 
will has no significance. The only reason one does 
not continue to make effort for an object is because 
desire for it fails. If one desires something as for 
instance a girl whom fate has given to another or 
quite taken away, and the desire for that girl con- 
tinues, it is not rationally a desire for something 
that exists, but for something that does not, and 
there results here a situation which is naturally 
solved by the desire attaching itself to something 
else. If the man cannot really have the woman on 
whom he has set his heart, he can set it upon some 
other woman or for ever rend himself with ungrati- 
fied desires. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 237 

The total inability to adapt to changing circum- 
stances like these, it may be remarked in passing, 
is the characteristic of those who suffer from a fixa- 
tion of libido on infantile objects, in men usually 
the mother or mother imago. There is no doubt 
that a very great adaptation must be made, in cases 
like this, but it is within the power of the average 
human that does not have such fixation, to make 
the adaptation, some in a short time, others in a 
longer. Those who make it in too short a time are 
called unsteady or fickle, although some kinds of 
fickleness are due to another cause. 

§ 16. Telepathy 

Taking any of the phenomena of spiritism, e. g., 
telepathy, where an idea in the shape of a mental 
image of sight, sound, touch, etc., appears in my 
conscious life, and is of such a nature that I can- 
not explain how it came there through ordinary 
conscious perception, it is evidently much more in 
the spirit of the principle of parsimony to explain 
it as a production of my own mind, not my con- 
scious mind, but the unconscious or subconscious 
mind. Certainly it is not truly scientific to invoke 
for peculiar mental circumstances an explanation 
that is far more elaborate and roundabout than 
necessary. Therefore it will have to be repeatedly 
emphasized that the scientist's first duty is to ex- 
plain the apparently exceptional phenomenon of 
telepathy in any of its forms, for example, as merely 
the transformation of an unconscious trend into a 



238 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

conscious idea, the message to my conscious life 
from a part of me that is and always will remain 
almost totally unconscious. The fact later to be 
discussed, namely that in thus emerging from the 
unconscious to consciousness, an idea, which in its 
former state exists as an indefinite craving and in 
the latter as a definite specific wish, suffers a " sea 
change into something rich and strange " — the fact 
of this transformation will account for a great deal, 
that is otherwise unaccountable, entering conscious- 
ness. 

And here it may be remarked that the familiar 
argument that the so-called super-normal informa- 
tion is due to mere chance is far more potent when 
we have taken the unconscious into account than it 
ever has been before. It is the commonest argu- 
ment of the psychical researcher, that the informa- 
tion which is gained by telepathy, or by any .form 
of spirit communication is much more remarkable 
than could possibly be subjectively guessed on the 
theory of probabilities. This information, he says, 
could not possibly have been guessed or divined or 
otherwise subjectively evolved by the person into 
whose consciousness it comes. This impossibility 
would mean that all the combinations and permuta- 
tions of all former experiences, sensations, percep- 
tions, etc., on my part would never give me the ma- 
terial to make the combinations of ideas constitut- 
ing the message in question. Possibly not, if we 
take into account only those mental states of which 
we have been conscious from the date of our birth 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 239 

onward. But when we consider the innumerable 
perceptions external and internal we have had dur- 
ing our entire lives of which we have not been con- 
scious, but which yet remain in the almost infinite 
storehouse of our individual unconscious, we shall 
clearly see that from the merely mathematical point 
of view of the theory of probabilities alone, the 
chances are at least tenfold greater that the mes- 
sage is but a message from our own unconscious 
to our conscious life, and that until this chance is 
absolutely removed by means of laboratory methods 
comprising the strictest scientific control, we shall 
not have fulfilled the most rigorous requirements 
of science. 

And it will be noted that in this book the dis- 
tinction is consistently made between what is sci- 
entifically known to be a fact and what is believed 
or (otherwise expressed only) desired or feared. 
The strictness of scientific proof requires us to ac- 
cept as fact not what has been only observed and 
testified to by witnesses under oath but what has 
been so described and formulated that any other 
person or persons can produce the same phenomena 
who has the same material. 

This requires us to preface all our inquiries by a 
consideration of two distinctions (1) that between 
belief and knowledge and (2) that between the two 
phases of conscious phenomena which Freud has 
discussed under the titles of reality principle and 
the pleasure-pain principle. As I purpose to take 
up the matter of belief and knowledge in a separate 



240 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

chapter (VII) I will here present that of Pleasure- 
Pain and Reality. According to the reality princi- 
ple all true scientific research proceeds, and I think 
I shall be able to show that all psychical research 
proceeds, upon the pleasure-pain principle. 

§ 17. Pleasure-Pain vs. Reality Principle 

Briefly stated the pleasure-pain principle is that 
according to which all ideas occur to the mind 
when they are not regulated or controlled by the 
reality principle which is a much later evolution of 
the human intelligence. The latter, for example, 
changed astrology into astronomy and alchemy into 
chemistry, and is changing internal medicine into 
medical psychology. On the pleasure-pain princi- 
ple the idea comes into the mind that it would be 
good to have pleasant weather tomorrow; on the 
reality principle we realize tomorrow whether the 
skies are fair or not. On the pleasure-pain princi- 
ple the idea occurs that it would be desirable if con- 
sciousness could survive death. On the reality 
principle we have yet to experience whether it 
will or not. On the one we get the idea of what 
we would do if we had immense wealth; on the 
other it occurs to us to count our cash, live inside 
our incomes, save and invest. On the one we fall 
in love and extravagantly over-rate the good quali- 
ties of the loved one; on the reality principle we 
realize that all is not gold that glitters, and that he 
who expects little may get more than he expects 
but will probably not suffer from disappointment. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 241 

On the pleasure-pain principle the idea inevitably 
occurs to every child, and later is only partially re- 
pressed by the man or woman, that it would be a 
mark of enormous power to have an arm that could 
reach to the moon if necessary and could be ex- 
tended and contracted ad libitum, to control ex- 
ternal things by means of words alone, to have eyes 
that could see infinite distances and infinitely 
small objects, to have ears that could hear what 
was going on in any part of the world, and a mind 
that could understand the language of all animals, 
to have the physical strength of Hercules, the 
beauty of Venus, the courage of Mars, the cunning 
of Mercury, in short to be able to annihilate space, 
time and the discrepancy between our real strength 
and that of any giant we could think of. In fact 
all the myths and fairy stories in the world of what- 
ever origin in various races and tribes originate 
from mental activities working according to this 
pain-pleasure principle and represent the hero, 
with whom the reader or listener subjectively iden- 
tifies himself, as one who avoids the pain of being 
weak, stupid and chained by time and space and 
custom, and gains the pleasure of being strong, 
cunning and freed from temporal, local and moral 
limitations. 

On this principle occur most of the phenomena 
of psychical research, not the facts proved by them 
to exist or not to exist, but the ideals and activities 
of the psychical researchers themselves. In fact 
the ideational content of the modern psychical phe- 



242 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

nomena in the first sense constitutes the modern 
fairy story. Restricted by the modern formula- 
tions of the laws of nature inferred through in- 
ductive logic by physics, chemistry, astronomy and 
psychology the modern fairy story is deprived of 
its puissant heroes of olden lore, but the pleasure- 
pain principle, being fundamental in the human 
psyche, still survives and expresses itself in the levi- 
tation, telepathy and materialization which are only 
new names for old things, believed in as were the 
exploits of the heroes of Greek or Scandinavian 
myth. It is inevitable that as long as humans are 
humans and swayed by unconscious wishes there 
will be expressions of the pleasure-pain principle. 
That these have taken a scientific colour is due to 
the growth during the centuries of the reality prin- 
ciple which infers causes and principles from sci- 
entifically observed phenomena. 

Incidentally it might be mentioned that the psy- 
chical researchers have a scientific program which 
they follow and they protest first and last that they 
value nothing more than the truth. They have ex- 
posed many frauds and have been most painstaking 
as the copious proceedings of the societies amply 
demonstrate. Indeed there is nothing in the orig- 
inal constitution of these societies that savours in 
the least of the operation of the pleasure-pain prin- 
ciple but shows only the reality principle at work. 
But the interpretations put upon the facts which 
they have demonstrated show the effect of the other 
principle. 



UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS AND WILL 243 

What I have said above indicates that the pleas- 
ure-pain principle is largely expressed in the desire 
for the magnification of the ego. The chief pain 
of the ego is to be curtailed, constrained or limited, 
as indeed our physical substrate is developed on the 
principle of growth and expansion. The funda- 
mental pleasure of the ego is its extension. 

Keeping in mind therefore the difference between 
the reality feeling, which is an internal sensation, 
and the principle of reality thinking, which is a 
mental process of a higher order, necessitating the 
perception of the relations of things to things and 
of things to sensations; and keeping in mind also 
the difference between the various sensations and 
images on the one hand and the pleasure-pain prin- 
ciple on the other, which is that principle on which 
the images naturally occur to the conscious mind or 
are repressed into the unconscious, and which has 
to be utterly rejected by any one in doing strictly 
scientific work, we shall be in a much better posi- 
tion to judge of the scientific or unscientific quality 
of the phenomena offered by the spiritists. 

Maeterlinck ( Unknown Guest, page 111 ) well ex- 
presses the attitude of mind dominated by the 
pleasure-pain principle in saying : " We can con- 
test or suspect any story whatever, any written 
proof, any evidence; but thenceforward we must 
abandon all certainty or knowledge that is not ac- 
quired by means of mathematical operations or lab- 
oratory experiments, that is to say, three-fourths 
of the human phenomena which interest us most." 



244 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

This certainly implies that we have a right to be- 
lieve what interests us, but not to claim that it is 
scientifically proven. Science has to abandon all 
so-called certainty or knowledge not acquired by 
mathematical operations or laboratory experi- 
ments, and brand it neither certainty nor knowl- 
edge. 

According to the reality principle we try to as- 
certain what things are and if possible why they 
are, without the slightest thought concerning what 
we would like to have them be, or become. This is 
the conscious program of the psychical researcher, 
but his unconscious program is quite different, 
based upon the pain-pleasure principle and forti- 
fied solely by the reality feeling, as I purpose to 
show in the following chapters. 



PAKT III 
THE UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 



CHAPTER VII 

BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 

In the spiritistic seance and in all study by 
psychical researchers of the phenomena of spirit- 
ism, the process is quite similar to that which I 
have described in Chapter V as taking place in the 
effort to recall a name. The person who is doing 
that is looking for only one thing — the name — 
and is excluding as well as he can from conscious- 
ness every other image and every other name that 
is unable to satisfy his feeling of sameness. The 
spiritualist is necessarily doing a quite analogous 
thing. With a stencil which he cannot see in his 
mind, he is rejecting every other thought or im- 
pression that occurs to him. The invisible stencil 
is the idea of the continuance of conscious person- 
ality or of a fact contradictory to nature's laws as 
now known and it is no wonder if he finds some- 
thing to fill the vacuum of that stencil. On the con- 
trary the modern scientist takes to nature no such 
preconceived stencil shape but tries to find the uni- 
form and universal principles that govern natural 
phenomena. 

§ 1. Belief 

Belief is the conscious expression of an uncon- 
scious wish. The unconscious wish of the individ- 
ual is for self-aggrandizement in all forms. One 

247 



2±8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

of the greatest of all the forms of human activity 
is that of the seer, who is one who can persuade 
his fellows that he can not only see but hear, or in 
other senses perceive, more than they. In all ages 
and in all grades of society the seer has been ac- 
cepted as one whose subjective ego has been most 
extensive, just as the hero in the shape of king or 
general has most enlarged his objective ego. 

I use the terms subjective and objective ego here 
in the senses used by William James in his psy- 
chology. The objective ego is every concrete thing 
that belongs to the individual, together with the 
fields of his external activity and all the parapher- 
nalia connected with them, his land, his house, his 
family, his horses, yachts, automobiles, golf and 
other equipment, his clubs, his business offices, in 
short everything over which he has special rights 
and control. His subjective ego is his mind, both 
his conscious and his unconscious mind, his sensa- 
tions, perceptions, thoughts, emotions and mem- 
ories, both buried and active. 

The medium has become in our day a seer, one 
whose subjective ego has enlarged itself beyond the 
bounds of the ordinary man, and he is worshipped 
in the modern manner by all who feel the need for 
hero worship — of the subjective sort. 

§ 2. Fear of Death 

Applying this thought to the matter of spiritism 
we see that biologically there should be in the 
healthy animal no concern for the continuance of 



BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 249 

his corporate consciousness, the desire for it being 
a matter of internal situation in himself and being 
the obverse- of his fear that it may not continue, for 
we never fear what we do not desire. We always 
consciously fear what we unconsciously desire and 
we consciously desire, in many instances, what we 
unconsciously fear. In the healthy human, abso- 
lutely normal and unimpaired in any way, the 
thought cannot spontaneously occur of the dissolu- 
tion of his personality nor the fear of it nor the 
wish for its continued integrity unless suggested to 
him verbally by some one who has, or has had, such 
a fear. The fear of death is the natural and un- 
conscious result of the subliminal perception of 
some incipient disintegration in the body, or weak- 
ening of some of the functions. The fear of death 
is the effect of advancing age, as is its conscious ob- 
verse, the desire to die. It is true enough that 
young people both fear death and commit suicide 
but their acts, if taken as the result of their total 
internal situation are always abnormal and their 
fears are implanted from without on a soil already 
deteriorating because of congenital weakness. 
Thus from another angle we see the abnormality of 
the deep interest in spirits displayed by some peo- 
ple. If I were much worried about what would be- 
come of my ego after my body's functions all ceased 
for ever, I should be most active in trying to find a 
means to prove my continued existence as a spirit 
after I ceased to exist as an organic body. Perhaps 
I should not call the interest in spirits an abnormal- 



250 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ity in old people. It may be normal in them just as 
the preponderant interest in bodies is normal in 
young people. But when young people display a 
more than verbal interest in spiritistic phenomena 
there is an indication that their love-life is strain- 
ing after symbols in the place of direct realities, 
which they are denied by fate. 

It is interesting to note that the committee ap- 
pointed by the Lambeth Conference of Bishops in 
1920 in London " deprecate popular interest in this 
whole realm and emphasize the dangers to mental 
health and peace which such interest threatens." 

The thoroughly absorbed psychical researcher, 
therefore, manifests traits of the neurotic disposi- 
tion. He is dominated by the death-wish complex. 
His utterances, like those of the medium, should, 
in order to assay them for their true value, have the 
dross of the unconscious element smelted out of 
them. For the manifestations of the unconscious 
are to science, but dross, slag, and sludge, no mat- 
ter how fine gold they may be for the artistic 
mental activities. The phantastic wish imaging of 
the undirected unconscious is exactly what the sci- 
entific man wishes to get rid of. Like the metal- 
lurgist his aim is definite and his results tangible 
and pragmatic. He may yet come to analysis of 
the dross of thought, has indeed been forced to it 
in the study of mental disorders, but it is for him 
exactly on a par with his other objective material. 
That is, it is his field of study. But it is fully 



BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 251 

known to him what he is studying and for what 
purpose he is studying it. 

But for the neurotic to take seriously the mental 
states in which he finds himself with regard to 
" spirit " and to attempt to force science to accept 
these phantasies as truths of the same importance 
as the laws of gravitation, of chemical affinity and 
of relativity is much like a child's asking an adult 
to accept his words about Mother Goose or Santa 
Claus as scientific truth and incorporating them in 
the principles of physics and chemistry. 

The neurotic is one whose psychical development, 
not his intellectual, has been arrested at an in- 
fantile stage. Much of his unhappiness comes from 
his over-estimation of the effect his wishes are sup- 
posed to have upon the world of external reality. 
The psychical researcher is in many respects at- 
tempting to fit fairy tales into the precession of the 
equinoxes and becoming a bit excited about the un- 
willingness of astronomers to accept his reconstruc- 
tion. 

§ 3. Continuousness of Urge 

From the impellent, the ever-driving-on, nature 
of the unconscious it is evident that it knows of no 
cessation, nor has there ever been found any rea- 
son for the ceasing of its activity during the integ- 
rity of the physical organism which is its material 
expression. As fire burns while fuel lasts and is 
within its reach, so does the unconscious ever strive. 



252 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

The idea of termination is a characteristic of con- 
sciousness itself. Visually we consciously see the 
ends of things, of sticks, of ropes, of lines, of sur- 
faces, we see where a thing is and where it is not. 
Our consciousness of one thing ends and that of an- 
other begins almost every second. And consciously 
we realize when our consciousness begins each day 
and generally where it ends each night. Therefore 
the idea of death is a conscious idea emanating from 
consciousness itself. Against the interrupted na- 
ture of conscious life, with its transitions f rom one 
sense quality to another, each one a break, an end- 
ing of one experience and a beginning of another, 
we have as a background the constant pull of the 
unconscious craving, the buoyant upward pressure 
as of water rising to its level, or as of gases with 
their constant tendency to expand. 

Contrasting with the flickering of the taper of 
consciousness, changing the colour of its light many 
times a minute with the transition from sight to 
sound, to touch, to organic sense, is the uniform 
brilliance of the light of the unconscious craving. 
It is no wonder then that the question of the im- 
mortality of the soul spontaneously occurs to con- 
sciousness, which perceives its every sensation 
terminating after brief duration. It is not a ques- 
tion which would occur to anything like the uncon- 
scious, that itself felt no change. And conscious- 
ness borne along, an agitated craft upon the 
rough surface, has no share in the tranquillity 
of the depth of the stream. The merest 



BELIEF BEFOEE KNOWLEDGE 253 

shallow speculation upon the transitoriness of 
the conscious life will at once reveal its many 
breaks, its crazy-patch-work quality when com- 
pared with the infinite calm, and reposeful infinity 
of the actual feeling of life and growth within. 

So we have here one of the strongest motives for 
a belief in the continuance of a personal conscious- 
ness after death. It is born of the even and un- 
ruffled drive of life in the vital organs themselves, 
as, in Greek mythology, Aphrodite was fabled to 
have been born of the foam of the sea waves. The 
unconscious cannot conceive of its end, but can 
only feel its own perpetual expansion. The con- 
trast between the unconscious feeling of being and 
the conscious sensation of ever changing, becoming 
and ending would alone account for the desire to 
continue conscious life and, its obverse, the fear of 
the discontinuance of states of consciousness. 

And it is but a step from the separate existence 
of the conscious life after death to the separate 
existence of consciousness during life, just as the 
savage or the child when dreaming, thinks he is in 
another place than where his body is. And, the 
dream, whether in the night or in the day, has 
this characteristic that it presents the dreamer 
with an apparent power over space. The savage 
dreams of killing game in a country new and 
strange and with powers of his own greater than 
he has experienced in waking life. Similarly the 
medium's communications with spirits are an ex- 
tension of power greater than ordinary in the 



254 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

average waking existence. The same desire is 
gratified by people who see or think they see the 
spirits of the departed as is gratified by the ex- 
tension or expansion of any physical tissue or 
organ. Power is felt by the medium in his 
trances. And his spectators and auditors feel, 
themselves, a vicarious power in the medium's acts 
and utterances. It is no wonder that both 
mediums and their adherents fancy they feel an 
actual physical force manifested at the seances, 
which they attribute to a supernatural source, 
which only means a source not recognized by the 
most rigorous physical science. 

The motive for a belief in perpetuation of per- 
sonal identity is a necessary consequence of the 
force of the unconscious vegetative life within us. 
Its cessation is unthinkable to the unconscious 
itself, which is incessant in its activity, integrat- 
ing sensations into perceptions absolutely inde- 
pendently of the existence of the stream of con- 
scious thought which is as but passing shadows on 
a screen. Now, given an ego made up of the abso- 
lutely regular and ceaseless vital urge of the uncon- 
scious and the flickeringly irregular and con- 
stantly terminating surface activity of conscious- 
ness, the contrast between the two could not but 
generate the wish for perpetuity, not of the 
unconscious, an idea which could not be born in 
the unconscious, but a wish for the perpetuity of 
conscious life. A wish is always for that which 
is not. We cannot wish to be what we are, for we 



BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 255 

are what we are. We can say we wish to be in 
the future what we now are in the present, but no 
such wish could be made except from the fear that 
in the future we shall not be as we are now. 
Freud has amply demonstrated that the uncon- 
scious has no sense of time, no past, no future, but 
only an ever permanent present. Therefore the 
sense of force or power or progress or movement or 
constant regular drive within us generates in con- 
sciousness a wish for permanence when the latter, 
with its ever ending, constantly terminating 
experiences is confronted with the cosmic flow of 
life in the Unconscious. Not until the uncon- 
scious drive emerges into the surface welter of 
conscious life does it become a wish, because, be- 
fore it came into the light of consciousness it 
could not, so to speak, see that anything ever 
ended. 

And as there are all degrees in definiteness of 
concept between the amorphous and perduring 
present of the deepest unconscious vital urge, and 
the vacillating and unsteady past and future of 
the transitory consciousness, so we can conceive 
the transformations of the urge into a more defi- 
nite but still unfixed and fluent desire and finally 
into a finished and finite wish having a visual or 
an auditory or tactual or even organic specific 
content. 

The urge is for perpetual expression of power, 
the desire is for long undulations of tension and 
relaxation, and the wish is for the specific and 



256 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

definite contact of an end organ of sensation with 
a particular stimulus or type of stimulus, or for 
what in more subjective spheres corresponds to 
these. 

§ 4. Verbal Expression 

On the part of every one there is the strongest 
possible objection to taking back or recanting what 
he has already stated. There are two reasons for 
this, the first being that his original statement was 
prompted by his unconscious wish and has behind 
it all the force of the unconscious and the second 
that the recantation is opposed by the same trend 
that caused the first statement. Therefore a man 
convinced against his will is of the same opinion 
still. 

I have mentioned elsewhere the fact that all 
statements, being the expression of judgments, are 
the verbal expression of the unconscious wish; in 
other words we naturally say that something is so 
merely because we wish it were so (whether it is 
or not). We express things positively in most 
instances in indicative moods of the verb, whereas 
if we were telling the objective truth we should 
use our verbs in the subjunctive, potential, or 
optative mood representing things as pro- 
posed, desired or conceived of as possible. 

While I am on the topic of verbal expression I 
should call to the reader's attention the fact that 
there does not need to be a verb in order to indi- 
cate a complete thought. Just as a shout " Fire ! " 



BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 257 

indicates that some one thinks a dangerous fire has 
started, so any noun uttered by a person may indi- 
cate, though it does not fully express, a degree of 
desire or aversion, from " Water " said in appeal- 
ing tone meaning " I am very thirsty " to " Rub- 
bish ! " " Fudge ! " or other contemptuous expres- 
sion which may " speak volumes." It is incon- 
ceivable that with every declaration in full 
grammatical sentence form there does not go un- 
derstood what might, using a mathematical term, 
be called an " exponent of desire." Then in the 
most positive statement made by any man we should 
expect the largest exponent of desire (or fear or 
aversion according to his emotional tone). With 
every declaration in words whether single nouns 
like those quoted above or phrases or sentences 
there manifestly goes along an accompaniment of 
desire concerning the matter-of-fact truth of it. 

My contention here is that in the verbal expres- 
sions of most people this emotional accompaniment 
is the efficient cause of the statement being made, 
and is not merely a subordinate affair. Psycholog- 
ically it is the whole show. This need not have 
anything to do with the real truth or falsity of the 
statement. Children's " lies " are all wish. Quite 
transparently they say what they do just because 
they wish what they say were, or would become, 
true. 

With the fewest exceptions, the same emotional 
colouring must be attributed to all statements 
made by all people. The statements made by the 



258 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

book agent, the insurance agent or any one who has 
anything to sell are unquestionably coloured by the 
emotions of the speaker, desire to sell, fear of being 
unable to sell, or to persuade the prospect. 

It is interesting to note in this connection the 
derivation of this word persuade. It is derived 
from the Latin adjective suavis which means 
" sweet, bland, pleasant." The verb derived from 
it therefore ( suadere ) means practically to sweeten 
anything (mostly a judgment) for a person, 
and the force of the per is " thoroughly, com- 
pletely " so that per-suade then always has had 
historically the radical meaning of successfully 
rendering a proposition sweet, i. e., acceptable to 
any one. 

The unconscious mechanism of identification 
works in the mind of the hearer with the effect of 
tending to make him always identify himself with 
the speaker. The hearer not only unconsciously 
tends to reproduce in himself, that is, to imitate 
the postural tonus ( see Chapter VI, sec. 2 ) but 
also to imitate him in matters more markedly 
mental, i. e., to identify himself with the speaker. 
And particularly is this the case with all state- 
ments in which there is an especially strong emo- 
tional factor. Indeed the emotions expansive and 
indefinite themselves are always struggling for con- 
centration and definiteness of expression, and the 
skilful orator is he who can align and train the 
emotions of his hearers toward a definite concept. 

Not only the orator but the actor, who is helped 



BELIEF BEFOKE KNOWLEDGE 259 

by scenery and costume, both potent marshals of 
unconscious emotions, is able to bring the feelings 
of his audience to a point so to speak where they 
fire the whole organism to action. The stage actor 
thus produces in the audience the clapping of 
hands and on extreme occasions the throwing of 
bouquets, etc. The spiritualistic seance actor pro- 
duces in his audience the wagging of tongues. I am 
sure that the manual plaudits of the theatre are 
in the majority of cases the only result of the 
actor's efforts, that the making of statements by 
the emotions of the sitters has been so far the only 
practical result of the trances of the medium. 

§ 5. Belief and Wish 

The belief in disembodied spirits is the direct 
result of the unconscious death-wish on the part of 
the individual having this belief. Previous to say- 
ing how this death-wish causes the conscious belief 
in the opposite of death, it will be necessary to say 
something about the idea of death itself existing 
in the unconscious of the persons most interested in 
proving immortality. The wish for the death of 
some definite person which is unconscious in the 
mind of the adult was a conscious wish in the mind 
of the same adult when he was a child. But it is 
not to be supposed that this wish was for actual 
demise and decomposition of the temporarily hated 
opponent. It was merely in the child's mind a 
conscious wish for the removal out of sight or 
sound or other sensation and was exactly on a par 



260 MANS UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

with the desire for the removal of any other unde- 
sired object, not necessarily involving the destruc- 
tion of the object. In other words psychical 
removal is desired, not physical removal. 

Now in the case of the removal of the object, 
when that object is a person, we see not merely 
that it is not literally death that is wished in most 
cases, but it is only a temporary removal that is 
wanted, and presently comes the wish for the reap- 
pearance of the person just wished dead. The 
whole thing is an absolutely childish mental mech- 
anism, depending on the child's belief in the 
omnipotence of the wish. 

§ 6. Sadistic Wish 

Another infantile mental trend however appears 
in the fabric of this immortality wish namely the 
sadistic-masochistic trend according to which the 
child takes pleasure in pain, either in inflicting it 
(sadism) or in having it inflicted upon him 
(masochism). His sadistic trend, if carried out, 
would lead him to torture and kill the persons an- 
tagonizing him. But these desires are early re- 
pressed into the unconscious through the agency 
of conventional civilization. 

When any desire is repressed into the uncon- 
scious it becomes a tension which is not relaxed but 
is constantly seeking relaxation, and it is bound to 
get relaxation either in the form originally imaged 
or in some form symbolic of, or otherwise represen- 
tative of, the original wish form. 



BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 261 

The way in which the sadistic death-wish tension 
is relaxed is through the compensatory wish for the 
continuance of the life of the person wished dead. 
Most individuals are adult enough in intelligence 
and the sense of reality to know that the dead do 
not come back in their own proper physical bodies. 
But the principle of compensation absolutely re- 
quires, as eye for eye and tooth for tooth, that the 
life taken away shall be given back in some form. 
As the adult's sense of reality is too keen to accept 
the supposition that the dead can be made to live 
again as they were, they must be made to live in 
some other way after death. Hence the spirit 
world, which is the objectification of the sadistic 
death-wish in the unconscious of the believer in 
spirits, and which is nothing else, having no foun- 
dation in absolute reality. 

This then is the explanation of the activities of 
the believers in spirit existence, and the stronger 
the unconscious sadism the profounder the belief 
and in some cases the more energetic the attempts 
to prove scientifically the existence of something 
that scientifically cannot be even conceived. 

The shape the unconscious death-wish has in the 
unconscious mind of the ardent advocate of spirit- 
ism is not that of the sentence " I wish F. were 
dead " but that of the sentence " F. is dead." And 
the necessary and inevitable conscious reaction to 
this unconscious state " F. is dead " is the belief 
" F. is living." But as even the simplest minded 
can see that F. is not living corporeally, the only 



262 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

choice left is that he is living incorporeally, i. e., as 
a spirit. And the stronger and more repeatedly 
iterated the unconscious state " F. is dead," the 
stronger is the conscious belief " F. is living " 
utterly regardless of fact. Indeed, other things 
being equal, the strength of the belief in spirits is 
directly proportional to the strength of the uncon- 
scious death-wish. Compensating for the psychic 
removal mentioned above, we now have the desire 
for the psychic restoration. 

The death-wish is by the very young child 
directed against any and every body and thing that 
interferes with his pleasure. The wish is equally 
directed against those who give him pain. We 
thus clearly see the derivation of this wish from 
the pleasure-pain principle of thinking. 

The sphere of pleasures and pains recognizably 
coming from persons and not things in the infants' 
world gradually widens approaching as its limit 
the entire universe. But those having most to do 
with the infant are the ones likely both to give the 
greatest pleasure and inflict the greatest pains. 
Life is made up of both, and where there is the most 
life, there will be most of both pain and pleasure. 
The infant's life, as far as persons are concerned is 
composed almost exclusively of mother and father 
and nurse and brothers and sisters. Is is there- 
fore not surprising on the one hand that they 
should most often be the objects of the infantile 
death-wish, and, on the other, that they should be 
the very ones about whose survival after death there 



BELIEF BEFORE KNOWLEDGE 2G3 

should in the average individual's mind be the 
most concern. 

§ 7. Spiritism and War 

There is, therefore, a connection between spirit- 
ism and war, history showing that after the swing- 
ing of the pendulum to the crassly material before 
or during a war there is a general swing toward 
the other direction of an excessive spiritual view 
after the war. So it has occurred during and after 
the late European conflict, the spiritual phenomena 
appearing not only during the war on account of 
the speedy satisfaction of the unconscious craving 
for excitement on the part of non-combatants and 
those invalided out of it, but also appearing after 
the war in a popular interest in things spiritual. 
This is contributed to, of course, but not caused 
by, the large number of deaths of those actively 
participating in the struggle. The sudden bereave- 
ments occasion but do not cause a recrudescence of 
the unconscious wish for self-preservation, and the 
neurotic part of humanity exhausts all its resources 
in trying to find logical reasons to prove that it 
has in these times the strongest motives for desir- 
ing to prove. Of this the book Roland is an indi- 
cation entirely apart from any scientific validity 
which the statements made in it may or may not 
have. 

From every side the facts point to the preponder- 
ant if not exclusive role played in spiritistic phe- 
nomena by the very fact of belief. Human think- 



264 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ing universally proceeds according to the program 
of believing first and trying to prove afterwards. 
This is the pain-pleasure principle referred to 
above, and quite independently of it and frequently 
absolutely antagonistic to it there develops quietly, 
slowly and surely the reality principle, which sees 
actual relations of things to each other, and does 
not merely see the relation of things to self and to 
the unconscious cravings of the ego. 

Thus it is the relations of things to each other 
which is the subject matter of all science, of astron- 
omy, of chemistry, of physics, of modern analytical 
psychology, while it is the relations of the things of 
the external world to the ego which constitutes the 
subject matter of art, music, poetry and all 
branches of human activity where the emotions 
enter in as an important factor. All these take 
their values from the emotional factor, whether it 
be conscious or unconscious, but largely from the 
latter because of its far greater richness and primi- 
tive power. 



CHAPTER VIII 

KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 

§ 1. Ambivalence 

The ancient Greek myths mentioned in Chapter 
V, those of Mobe, Arachne, and Salmoneus who 
were punished by the gods for over much pride and 
self-aggrandizement are the working out of an idea 
into externality — giving concrete form to it 
— an idea that is founded upon the physical fact 
that existence is the result of opposing forces. 
The solidest marble is conceived as the result of 
the interplay of atoms in reciprocating motion of 
infinite rapidity. The position of any living 
animal is the net result of the contractions of his 
antagonistic muscles, which are in pairs all over 
his body. Suddenly paralyse one of any of these 
pairs and the other of them will contract still more 
until compensation is otherwise made. 

In our mind there is the same balance main- 
tained by opposing ideas, or the ideas are our con- 
sciousness of presence or lack of the balance of 
certain minute antagonistic muscles situated 
somewhere in our body. In the myth of Niobe, and 
in the proverb " Pride goeth before a fall " there 
is the recognition of the same antagonism. In the 
internal sensations called emotions there is inev- 
itably a reaction. If we become hilarious, we 

265 



266 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

actually get tired of being hilarious and presently 
become serious. 

Applied to the emotions this action and reaction 
rhythm is called ambivalence. It is as character- 
istic of the emotional life as it is of the muscles of 
the athlete or of the molecules of marble in the 
statue of the athlete. 

But it is not enough to say that emotions succeed 
each other in consciousness rhythmically chang- 
ing from grave to gay, from fear to courage, from 
love to hate. That is merely describing what ap- 
pears on the surface. The succession of emotions 
manifest to consciousness is determined in every 
case by tensions in the unconscious with which the 
conscious emotions, moods, etc., are more closely 
connected than they are with each other. 

§ 2. Mental Microscope 

The intimate construction of many material 
things is made visible by looking at them through 
a microscope. In psychological analysis we have 
such a microscope. The same result would be at- 
tained if we could magically enlarge the object we 
wished to see. If we could dip a fly into a magic 
liquid that would increase each particle of him so 
that the whole of him would be as large as an 
elephant, we could look at him with the naked eye 
and learn as much or more of his structure as we 
now do by means of the microscope. It is just a 
question of relative dimensions between him and 
us. 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 267 

There is a similar enlargement naturally taking 
place in the minds of certain people. We call 
these people abnormal but the enlargement takes 
place according to absolutely regular natural laws. 
We can in such people see, if we look, the ideas of 
one thing and another, and their emotions and the 
connections between emotions and ideas. They 
have been enlarged to the scale necessary to be 
observed by human eyes that can see. For these 
enlarged mental states we need no microscope; we 
need only the reality principle working in our 
minds to show us the actual relations between ideas 
and emotions and things, relations we ought to 
know so as to be able to act more intelligently 
toward our fellows, but which we are only begin- 
ning to know. It is as if Nature had herself gratui- 
tously, and without any making or arranging of 
lenses on our part, enlarged some mental fly so 
that any one with the right attitude toward life 
could see the structure of his human mind, and 
make the logical inference about the minds of others. 

The people whose mind-states are thus naturally 
enlarged are called neurotics. In the past they 
were called abnormal, but we know that there is 
nothing abnormal' about them except their over- 
size ideas. The scientific study of these over-size 
ideas has given us the deepest knowledge we ever 
had about the structure and functions of the mind. 
The magic liquid in which we proposed to soak our 
illustrative fly is not needed here, for the fly has 
himself expanded, as, to our view, expands the on- 



2G8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

coming vessel in the harbour till it reaches the 
dock and we can board and examine it. 

The neurosis is the magic liquid which exagger- 
ates the size of certain things, and the neurotic, for 
our present purposes of comparison, is merely one 
who shows a " close-up " of a normal soul in opera- 
tion. His ability to get nearer to us so that we 
can see him is his only peculiarity. 1 But we have 
always pushed him away whenever he has come 
nearer until Freud indicated the way to study him 
by means of looking at the shadows, as it were, or 
less illuminated portions, of this nearby view. 

§ 3. The Neurotic 

All this by way of introduction to the account of 
what the neurosis has shown us about the working 
of the ordinary unmagnified mind. There is a 
type of neurotic the main lineaments of whose 
u close-up " mental picture are the tendencies 
which he shows to do certain things without defi- 
nitely knowing why he does them. Asked why he 
does them he may give no answer or may say he 
does not know. He does know that he feels un- 
comfortable or unhappy if he does not do them. 
This also might be said of many habits in ordinary 
people, like smoking for instance, and many 
peculiar mannerisms of posture, action and voice. 
To explain them as merely habit is however to give 
no real explanation, which indeed lies in the un- 
conscious wish behind these actions. 

i Cp. the words of Frank, Chap. V. 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 269 

The neurotic, however, of the type I am describ- 
ing feels a much more compulsive tendency to carry 
out his actions and the actions themselves are 
likely to be more peculiar than those generally 
known as habits. They are habits, but they are 
eccentric habits and moreover they are habits not 
of body primarily but of mind. 

Examples of these habits are infinitely various 
from washing the hands every time the neurotic 
touches any particular thing, which itself is eccen- 
trically picked out for this special reaction, to a 
necessity felt for counting one class of objects or 
another, or balancing fortunate happenings with 
misfortunes in the daily paper. 

The classical illustration is the compulsion not 
to touch certain objects. 1 Nothing definite was 
known about the cause of this compulsion until 
hypnosis was used, and the patient then remem- 
bered what it was that one time when a child he 
had very much desired to touch and had been for- 
bidden. The prohibition later was forgotten. All 
the patient consciously knew was, not that he had 
been told not to touch the object in question (a 
part of himself), but, that he had the strongest 
possible aversion to touching it. Consciously it 
gave him much displeasure if he had to touch it. 
In the hypnosis it was revealed that formerly it 
gave him the keenest pleasure to touch that part 
of himself. So it is shown that the unconscious 
motive that impelled him to touch was the pleas- 

i Freud: Totem and Taboo, page 48. 



270 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ure he received from the act. Also what caused 
him to stop touching it was a greater pleasure 
coming from pleasing the person, his father, who 
told him not to touch. The pleasure or satisfac- 
tion of not touching remained in consciousness, 
and the other pleasure was forgotten. But the 
unconscious motive still remained, and was the 
motive power for the compulsion. 

So it may be said of this person that uncon- 
sciously he still strongly desires to touch while 
consciously he has the strongest aversion to touch- 
ing this part of himself, an aversion as strong as is 
the unconscious desire. We may say that this 
patient at one and the same time both wants, and 
does not want, to touch. This strong antagonism 
between motives and the emotions behind them is 
the ambivalence mentioned above. In no sense 
could it be called abnormal, being the absolutely 
necessary result of the desire coming from within 
and the prohibition imposed from without. And 
not only neurotics but also completely normal aver- 
age individuals can find examples in their own lives 
of this emotional ambivalence. It is the effect of 
contrary pulls from within and without, and in- 
evitably produces its perfectly natural result. 
Only in the neurotic the result is magnified so that 
it can easily be seen, while in the average individual 
it is generally unnoticeable unless specially looked 
for. 

The importance of this detailed study of the 
ambivalence of the emotions of the neurotic is that 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 271 

it shows exactly what takes place in normal life 
among primitive peoples with regard to their 
actions toward their parents and ultimately toward 
their ancestors. And it furnishes thus a very clear 
idea of how religions have always arisen in all 
races. 

§ 4. The Normal Compulsion 

The greatest pleasure to the ego of the primitive 
man, is to be the strongest, which includes the 
death or banishment of all the other men of the 
group whatever the group — family or tribe — may 
be. Whatever prohibition may come from with- 
out to the men of such a group, the earliest example 
of it being the family, would come only as a pro- 
hibition against doing what was very much desired. 
In fact no restrictions or restrictive laws are ever 
made against any action that is not much desired. 

Before going on with this topic I shall stop long 
enough to remark that the making of the prohibi- 
tion itself is the work of the unconscious desire on 
the part of the maker of the prohibition to do the 
prohibited thing. Furthermore, the vigour with 
which any infringement of this law is punished is 
determined by the strength of the desire on the 
part of the persons punishing to do the same thing. 

§ 5. The Taboo 

The ambivalence of emotion shown by the com- 
pulsion neurotic is found to be closely paralleled 
by the actions of many primitive peoples with re- 
gard to certain things. The word taboo which has 



272 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

recently come into all civilized languages from the 
Pacific Islands expresses that group of actions. 
According to the taboo, a man may not do this or 
that, a more or less elaborate code of action vary- 
ing somewhat in different races of primitive peo- 
ples. The striking peculiarity of all the taboos is 
their apparent unreason and unaccountability. 
The savages themselves have no more coherent 
reason to assign for what they do than has the com- 
pulsion neurotic for his eccentricities. No light 
could be thrown on the actions of primitive man 
under the taboo regulations until the unconscious 
wish was taken into account. 

Another striking fact of primitive social life is 
the totem and the effect it has upon the conduct of 
the tribe on the one hand and the biological status 
of the tribe on the other. On the face of it the 
totem is a plant or animal with which the mem- 
bers of the totem group identify themselves, with 
the result that they thus compel themselves not to 
kill or mate with any one of the same totem group. 
Furthermore, also an important point, they identify 
themselves with the totem to the extent of believ- 
ing that they are descendants of it. Thus there 
results a social mechanism preventing inbreeding. 
How it originated w^as a matter of doubt and specu- 
lation until Freud's explanation of the unconscious 
motivation of it. 

For he has shown that the prohibitions con- 
nected with the totem are against the fundamental 
desire on the part of the unconscious of all peo- 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 273 

pies to do the very thing this particular taboo pro- 
hibited, namely the mating with the nearest female, 
which in the family or totem group would naturally 
be the nearest relatives. This is also related to 
the descent of the tribe from the totem animal or 
plant, if we reflect that the very thing that is pro- 
hibited, namely the mating with women within the 
totem group is exactly what is on the one hand 
most desired by the young males of that group and 
what is most decidedly not wished by the head of 
the group who is most identified with the totem 
and is in a sense the representative of the father. 
This prohibition drives the young males to seek 
mates from other groups and the biological require- 
ment of cross fertilization is fulfilled. 

§ 6. The Totem 

From this very brief explanation of what is in 
reality a much more complicated matter we come 
to the consideration of the evident derivation of 
spirits from the projection of the father idea into 
the totem. The father or head of the totem group 
is naturally the chief enemy of the young males 
from the point of view of their desires to mate with 
their own totem-group women. He is the chief 
factor in their inability to do so. So he received 
an amount of hatred from the young, which is 
either conscious or repressed into the unconscious, 
according to the state of civilization of the group. 
In modern civilized society the unconscious antag- 
onism between father and sons in their rivalry for 



274 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

the attention and affection of the wife and mother, 
is generally a wholly unconscious affair, but yet it 
explains many otherwise inexplicable actions on 
the part of both father and sons. Generally, too, 
and under the influence of most religions, there is 
even a good bit of affection and reverence felt by 
the sons for the father. His superiority in age and 
attainments and social position sometimes indeed 
compel the admiration of his sons. But the effect 
of this unconscious hatred of father and sons is to 
produce in the sons consciously or unconsciously, 
as the case may be according to civilization, a 
strong feeling of joy when the father dies. Now 
this feeling of joy is balanced by a real sense of 
loss and a regret for the hatred that has been ex- 
pended upon the father. So that there are present 
the motives both for exalting the good qualities of 
the father and fearing and propitiating him in his 
hostile aspect. 

It is virtually this hostility of his sons that deifies 
him in their eyes and not the friendly feelings, 
paradoxical though this may at first appear. His 
greatest strength with them is as their enemy, for 
his tenure is dependent on his ability to overcome 
them either physically or mentally. Therefore the 
power and the glory which is attributed to their 
father when he is in their heaven is the association 
of a feeling of reality in themselves with the idea 
or mental image, not his actual presence, naturally, 
as he is dead. And this linking of a feeling of 
reality with something no longer existing is the 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 275 

cause of all belief in spirits from the earliest pre- 
historic times to the present clay. This recoupling 
of the reality feeling with an idea or image is no 
rarity at any time, particularly after the reality 
feeling has of necessity been uncoupled from its 
former associates, the actual visual and other sense 
qualities of the living ancestor. And the belief 
that he is now a spirit is reinforced by a belief that 
spirits are more powerful than and can do much 
harm to the living. 

§ 7. " Spirit " a- Projection 

This projection of the unconscious wish, to 
maintain existence after death, into the hyposta- 
tization of a spirit is at the bottom of all religions, 
both the most ancient animistic and anthropomor- 
phic and the most modern, the spiritistic. In all 
races and nations the father becomes a deity, or 
the deity takes on the paternalistic form, and men 
consciously believe, because they unconsciously 
wish, that they too, when their time comes to die, 
may yet live like the ancestor, whom they have 
given a spiritual life, in order on the one hand to 
propitiate him and on the other to recompense him 
for the hatred with which he was regarded during 
his life, and substitute in their own life a pleasant 
affection for the unpleasant hate. 

It is thus evident that the projection of an in- 
ternal sensation upon the external world is the 
origin both of the compulsion neurosis in the in- 
dividual and the religion of a people or a race. It 



276 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

is all the more imperative, therefore, that any 
statement claimed to be scientific, about the exist- 
ence of a disembodied intelligence be with the 
greatest care examined as to its origin. 

The history of science has plenty of examples of 
the reality principle being overcome by the pleas- 
ure principle of thinking. The latter furnishes the 
impediment to the instant acceptance of any scien- 
tific truth, and has, from Galileo's time until the 
present day. As an example of this we may men- 
tion the survival for so long a time of Lamarckian- 
ism in the theory of evolution in spite of the ac- 
cumulating proofs that the innate constitution 
of the germ plasm is the medium of heredity and 
that no characteristics acquired in adulthood can 
have an effect upon the genes or subgenes of the 
chromosomes. 

The projection of internal sensations upon the 
external world is attributing to the world qualities 
inherent only in the person doing the attributing. 
It is belief and not fact, scientific fact being a mat- 
ter in which the internal sensations are in no way 
concerned. The evidence of the senses is worth- 
less for science. The very fact that there are such 
things as hallucinations is sufficient proof of this. 
That there are visual mental images sometimes 
associated with quite as strong a feeling of reality 
as are actual visual impressions generally, should 
make ridiculous the idea of offering as scientific 
proof of disembodied intelligences any statement 
based on the " evidence of the senses." It should 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 277 

at once call for the complete exclusion of the 
human element from all experimentation with the 
end in view of showing personality existing apart 
from the body. But in spite of the manifest neces- 
sity of excluding human error the so-called proofs 
of existence of spirit have been almost without ex- 
ception presented in a form where not only is the 
human element present but also the unconscious 
element is paramount, that factor which the spirit- 
ists have never yet analysed with the thoroughness 
that the psychoanalysts have evinced in their really 
scientific study. For, as has been mentioned else- 
where, a scientific truth is never a presentation 
(sensation or impression or feeling) but is a uni- 
formly observed relation between presentations, 
either a quantitative or a qualitative relation, such 
as are the facts on which chemistry and physics are 
based. 

The present day motives for a belief in spirits 
are not adequately accounted for without tracing 
this connection with the motives which must have 
been the unconscious ones on the part of primitive 
man in his development of the philosophic system 
known as animism. 

In his Totem and Taboo (p. 154, N. Y. 1918) 
Freud puts the question: "What essential part 
of our psychological structure is reflected and re- 
viewed in the projection formation of souls and 
spirits? " and answers it as follows : " The thing 
which we, just like primitive man, project into 
outer reality, can hardly be anything else than the 



278 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIEIT 

recognition of a state in which a given thing is 
present to the senses and to consciousness, next to 
which another state exists in which the thing is 
latent but can reappear, that is to say, the coexis- 
tence of perception and memory, or, to generalize 
it, the existence of unconscious psychic processes 
next to conscious ones. It might be said that in 
the last analysis the spirit of a person or a thing 
is the faculty of remembering and representing the 
object after he or it was withdrawn from con- 
scious perception." 

If society attempts to wipe out but really only 
represses extensive areas of the mating or parental 
instinct, what aim or purpose of society's is thereby 
striven toward? It must not be supposed that be- 
fore the present century, society has been conscious 
of any specific aim. Society as a conscious indi- 
vidual is conceivable, but the concept is irrelevant 
in the present discussion. The conscious indi- 
vidual may also be regarded as an organism of 
separately existing elements more or less as 
a nation is organized into a unit by the compelling 
personality of one of its individual members, or as 
a large commercial organization is dominated by a 
Eockefeller or a Vail. There are people who are 
as well integrated as any huge business corpora- 
tion and others as ill as some " general stores " in 
rural districts. 

A separate human individual may be conceived 
as consisting of a combination or assemblage of 
two or more unitarily functioning constituents. 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 279 

The body is composed of various " systems " that 
are named according to the unities that they ap- 
parently comprise. There is the nervous system 
and the circulatory system, the alimentary and the 
lymphatic system, and within these the arterial, 
the gastric, enteric, etc., the body being made up 
of various organs each one of which is practically 
a unity by itself and yet has an essential interde- 
pendence upon some other or others. In fact it is 
almost impossible to decide where one begins and 
the other leaves off, and the fact that not one of 
these organs could function outside of the body, 
would make it seem impossible that it could be 
called a separate organ, in spite of the fact that 
hearts have been kept beating and kidneys capable 
of functioning in foreign receptacles for weeks. 
The idea that the individual human is an individual 
in the sense of being able to maintain a separate 
existence is only relative. If he were taken out of 
all mundane relations he would not live, and if he is 
removed from social relations only, in such a way 
that he could not ideally reproduce remembered 
social relations, such as was the history of persons 
like Caspar Hauser, he will cease to be, or will 
never be, human. 

§ 8. Repression of Mating Instinct 

But when we talk of society repressing a natural 
instinct we are in general really talking about no 
more conscious process than there is in the growth 
of a tree, until we begin to realize that in this, the 



280 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

twentieth century, there are elements of activity 
in operation that are analogous to the mental 
activity of individuals. 

It is true enough that, in the past, groups of 
individuals have acted with apparent unity of pur- 
pose, and with a purpose that seemed to visualize 
so clearly the end achieved that one is impressed 
with the wonder of it. 

For example, the various means which savage 
tribes have adopted to secure cross fertilization and 
prevent inbreeding show an integrated activity 
characterizing the group, resulting in certain 
taboos, thus preventing the " marriage " of closely 
related persons. It is not to be supposed, however, 
that cross fertilization was in any way maintained 
as a conscious aim. On the contrary, taboos of 
this nature exist among savages who are so ignor- 
ant of sexual physiology as not to know the con- 
nection between intercourse and conception. 

But in the modern scientific knowledge of the 
laws of heredity which we have accumulated so far, 
we see that while the savage may not have been 
conscious of exactly what he as an individual was 
doing for the betterment of his tribe, there must 
have been in the unconscious minds of the un- 
tutored themselves just those combinations of 
ideas, derived in all probability from experience, 
that made them do the things whose wisdom they 
could not see. Under the name of worshipping a 
hideous totem they did what we with our scientific 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 281 

knowledge call by an entirely different name. 
The instinct of man which causes him to adopt 
customs minimizing inbreeding is only one of the 
many instincts shown by him, some of which have 
indeed landed him in his present pitiable predica- 
ment. It may be said that his instincts have 
prompted him in some parts of the world to exactly 
the opposite kind of acts. 

As the net result of the instincts on which pres- 
ent civilization is founded is so humiliating in view 
of the present conditions all over the world it is 
well worth considering whether the natural evolu- 
tion of social ideals, in which little if any of the 
unconscious mental process is taken into considera- 
tion, is worth maintaining at all. Would it not be 
better to make a really objective study of the 
human and animal instincts everywhere, and 
attempt to find out what they have led to in their 
various developments in different parts of the 
world? Furthermore, is such an objective scien- 
tific study practically possible and could the results 
of it, when arrived at, be transmitted to enough of 
the world to make it really practicable? Evidently 
not enough people have thought so to make a really 
noticeable difference. 

And yet, in view of the increasing knowledge 
which a spread of intercommunication between 
peoples produces, without such an effort to dis- 
cover what has been done by humans and what 
could be done, humanity would be supine indeed. 



282 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

All we can do is to do all we know how, at the same 
time studying as diligently as possible how we can 
do better. 

According to his lights a few generations ago all 
a man could do was to obey the authoritative com- 
mands of the church or the king and he would know 
that he was doing as well as he was or could be 
expected to do. But the theory of democracy is 
that each man is now himself a king, or at any rate 
should be authority for himself. This implies that 
all men should be trained as potential leaders so 
that the most potent shall be chosen to lead where 
leading is necessary. How far this theory is justi- 
fied would be much more evident if the spiritists' 
following were greater than it is. Why it is not 
greater will appear when we have considered the 
motives which impel mankind toward religious and 
other beliefs. 

It would be well here to consider these motives 
and to preface them with the briefest possible ex- 
position of the nature and extent of the unconscious 
mental operations of humanity. Why is it that 
some men believe one thing and others believe the 
direct contradictory of it? The answer can be 
only that they believe what they consciously or un- 
consciously desire to be so. " Belief " is the same 
word as " lief " which is derived from A. S. leof 
(dear) and is the same as the English love. Be- 
lieve then fundamentally means to regard any 
statement as desirable, not as scientifically proven 
to exist in actuality. The thoughtful observer can 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 283 

always notice this dominating motive in other peo- 
ple's beliefs, from the little child's statement after 
dropping a glass on the floor and breaking it : " It 
won't matter " to the most general political tenet, 
whether protection or free trade, paternalism or 
individualism. The little child's utterance " It 
won't matter " clearly expresses her concern over 
the accident and her desire to learn that no serious 
damage has been done. The political orator's logic 
is supplied from the same source. He wishes that 
protection, or prohibition or the league of nations 
or socialism or communism may win at the next 
election and he makes all the statements he can 
think of that say or appear to say the same thing. 
His motives may be conscious or unconscious. If 
he consciously argues for what unconsciously he 
does not believe we call him insincere or unscrup- 
ulous. If he argues consciously for the same be- 
lief that he wishes unconsciously to be true, he will 
be called sincere, and his arguments will have the 
greater influence upon his hearers, because their 
own unconscious faculties will not then detect in 
him inconsistencies that would otherwise appear. 
But it should not be forgotten that his hearers 
sometimes come to hear him in order to have their 
own conscious or unconscious beliefs supported, 
and that they are both in the same boat, so it is true 
everywhere that people do not wish to hear nor 
will they listen attentively to arguments against 
their beliefs, i. e., their conscious or unconscious 
wishes. The fact is that they cannot hear such 



284 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

arguments or cannot apperceive them on account 
of their predisposition. 

§ 9. Belief is not Knowledge 

So it is appropriate to consider the nature of the 
motives which impel men to believe in survival and 
in communication with those personalities who, as 
they believe, in some spiritual or other state sur- 
vive death. With the actual existence of any scien- 
tific proof of immortality or survival in any shape 
this book has nothing whatever to do. The point 
of view of the present writer is that neither proof 
nor disproof, worthy of being called scientific, has 
ever been presented. The presentation of what is 
offered as a proof is evidence on the part of any one 
presenting it that he himself or his auditor may 
have a doubt about it. 

It is unscientific to believe or to doubt. What 
w r e know we know positively. I do not believe that 
all men are mortal. I know it, not alone by direct 
evidence of the senses, for I should not be sure that 
a sleeping man was not dead if his respiration or 
circulation were not perceptible or that a newly 
deceased, but still warm, person was not alive. I 
know it by other means more scientific than mere 
sense perception. 

In the waves of spiritism which periodically 
break over society what instincts are followed and 
what unconscious wishes are gratified, is the real 
question in any consideration of the social aspect 
of spiritism. Following the concepts deduced by 



KNOWLEDGE ABOVE BELIEF 285 

Freud I have attempted to show that modern 
spiritism, like prehistoric animism is but the pro- 
jection upon the external world of unconscious de- 
sires — a projection* which is perfectly natural and 
proceeds on the pleasure-pain principle, but which 
not only has no scientific status, but can have no 
scientific meaning. An idea which is the result, on 
the contrary of the reality principle of mental ac- 
tivity is on a different level or in a different sphere 
from an idea which is created by the pleasure-pain 
principle. The material progress of the present 
day is made by the thinking taking place in one of 
these spheres, the animism and spiritism of all ages 
is the inevitable product of the other principle. 
Each has its value for life but it is the acme of 
irrationality to attempt to affirm the truths of the 
latter in the language of the former and think the 
values are the same. 



CHAPTER IX 

man's unconscious spirit 

§ 1. Divisions of Psychical Research 

The main divisions of psychical research are on 
the one hand those concerning transmission of im- 
pressions from personality to personality, tele- 
pathy, etc., or on the other hand those concerning 
apparent contradictions of or exceptions to the 
laws of nature generally accepted by the scientific 
world, snch as levitation or the overcoming of the 
principle of gravitation, actio in distans or the 
physical effect produced on a material object with- 
out apparent physical cause. The latter are sub- 
jects that in some cases are not claimed to be con- 
nected with any specific human intelligence, for 
example, the unexplainable movements of bricks 
and stones in a cave in England reported by Conan 
Doyle. All such phenomena, if they really exist, 
are matters for physical science to investigate, and 
will not be touched upon in this book. Using the 
definition of belief developed here, the present 
writer unhesitatingly would declare that he believes 
in their authenticity but that he does not have sci- 
entific knowledge of them nor is he acquainted 
with any one who knows them as facts scientifically 
proven. 

Much the same may be said of the matter of 

286 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 2S7 

spirit photographs and other apparent exceptions 
to chemical and physical laws that are more closely 
associated in time with the intelligence of an in- 
dividual person, such as the lifting of tables which 
is said to occur because of the co-operation of sev- 
eral minds at once; or, for example, the playing, 
and translation through space, of a mandolin in 
the presence of and supposedly because of the voli- 
tion of a personality operating through a medium. 
The present writer believes in all these, though his 
conscious wish to see Nature's laws so capriciously 
upset may not be so strong as his unconscious wish 
for the same irregularity. 

The question of prophecy is one that is involved 
in metaphysics even for the spiritist, and Maeter- 
linck in his Unknown Guest has shown some of the 
absurdities of premonitions. I quote from that 
book a passage (p. 160) which shows how the mat- 
ter appears to one who is so swayed by his uncon- 
scious wishes that he cannot accept the crassly ma- 
terial statement of fact: 

" Besides, in the gloomy regions of precognition, 
it is almost always a matter of anticipating a mis- 
fortune and very rarely, if ever, of meeting with a 
pleasure or a joy. We should therefore have to 
admit that the spirits which drag me to the fatal 
place and compel me to do the act that will have 
tragic consequences are deliberately hostile to me 
and find diversion only in the spectacle of my suf- 
fering. What could those spirits be, from which 
evil world would they arise, and how should we ex- 



288 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIKIT 

plain why our brothers and friends of yesterday, 
after passing through the august and peace-bestow- 
ing gates of death, suddenly become transformed 
into crafty and malevolent demons? Can the great 
spiritual kingdom, in which all passions born of the 
flesh should be stilled, be but a dismal abode of 
hatred, spite and envy? It will perhaps be said 
that they lead us into misfortune in order to purify 
us; but this brings us to religious theories which it 
is not our intention to examine." 

" Premonition/' he says in another place ( Op. cit. 
134), " cares but little for the human value of the 
occurrence and puts the vision of a number in a 
lottery on the same plane as the most dramatic 
death. The roads by which it reaches us are also 
unexpected and varied. Often, as in the examples 
quoted, it comes to us in a dream. Sometimes it is 
an auditory or visual hallucination which seizes 
upon us while awake ; sometimes an indefinable but 
clear and irresistible presentiment, a shapeless but 
powerful obsession, an absurd but imperative cer- 
tainty which rises from the depths of our inner 
darkness, where perhaps lies hidden the final an- 
swer to every riddle." 

§ 2. Unwarranted Inferences 

As an illustration of the propensity of the unsci- 
entific mind to make unwarranted deductions I will 
give the following possibility from my own experi- 
ence. I entered one evening in the dark the room 
in which my daughter, three years old, was sleeping 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 289 

in her crib, next to her mother's bed. At once I 
was seized with a temporarily unaccountable idea 
that my wife was present in the room, though I 
could see nothing. I can understand how this feel- 
ing might have been construed by a spiritualist as 
a proof of telepathy or spirit influence emanating 
from my wife and acting upon my hypersensitive 
receptors. But as a matter of fact I had uncon- 
sciously heard her there. She stood between me 
and an open window thus cutting in two the slight 
sounds that came in from out doors. I was not 
conscious of hearing her at first or of hearing her 
presence in the form of interruption of sound be- 
tween me and the window. I thought to myself: 
" I believe N. is down stairs ; how strange that I 
should have so strong yet indefinite an impression 
that she is right here in the room with me. I know 
she is in the room. I cannot see her or hear her 
or feel her in any way but I am sure she is here. 
How can I account for the impression? " Then I 
actually heard her move as she adjusted the child's 
bedclothes. But there did not appear any tele- 
pathy in the incident as it is quite evident that I 
must have heard her unconsciously in both ways 
above mentioned — that my unconscious heard her, 
as she was in the room when I entered, having gone 
in before me, and as I went into the room with con- 
scious attention on far other matters. I had gone 
there to get something and when I enter a dark 
room in my house to get something my conscious 
mind is full of mental images which obliterate 



290 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

all slight impressions from outside sources. I have 
visual images of the object I am looking for and 
cutaneous and motor images of the various pieces of 
furniture I anticipate touching to guide myself ; so 
that if I bump into my chair in an unexpected place 
I get a very strong impression. As I entered the 
dark room on the occasion above noted, therefore, 
it is absolutely certain that my feeling of my wife's 
presence, although my back was turned to her, was 
an unconscious perception, mediated by impressions 
of an auditory quality which were at first unable 
to penetrate into my conscious thought-stream be- 
cause of the vivid images of two sense qualities 
already there, viz. : tactual and auditory. Later the 
auditory stimuli which were continuous from the 
moment of my entering the room till I became con- 
sciously aware of her presence, were released, as 
one might express it, into consciousness by the re- 
tirement of the internal images in favour of the 
actual auditory sensations which they had pre- 
viously excluded. 

This exclusion of actual impressions is no un- 
common thing in my own case or in any one's else. 
It accounts for the failure of all impressions not 
attended to, to occupy the focus of consciousness, 
e. g., everything in the field of vision that we do not 
see, and everything in the ordinary melange of 
sounds that does not have personal significance for 
us. At the time of their action on the sense organs 
these stimuli are not merely subconscious in the 
sense of faintly conscious as are the objects near 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 291 

the outside of the field of vision of the fixated 
eye, but they are totally unconscious or entirely out 
of consciousness. They make no conscious impres- 
sion whatever. They finally become conscious or 
enter consciousness only after they have either be- 
come related to some idea strong enough to enter 
consciousness or have become so intense or cumu- 
lative as to make a positive onslaught upon the 
conscious stream. 

And in this connection it must not be forgotten 
that a stimulus which in some circumstances might 
be strong enough to constitute a severe shock to the 
psyche, such as a bullet wound in the leg, may in 
other circumstances such as a battle not enter con- 
sciousness at all at the time, and only do so later 
when the conscious thought-stream, which by un- 
precedented excitement has been fixed and nar- 
rowed into a very fine thread, so to speak, is re- 
leased, by the subject's being taken out of the bat- 
tle, or by the excitement having otherwise sub- 
sided. Then the stream of consciousness, freed 
from the constriction in which the excitement has 
bound it to some highly specialized and definite 
stimulus, has the opportunity to wander over the 
various parts of the body and suddenly becomes 
aware of a fierce pain in the leg. 

§ 3. Narrowing of Consciousness 

Just as the narrowing of consciousness to a 
group of stimuli of vital importance will render 
everything except that group incapable of enter- 



292 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ing consciousness, so will the opposite action of 
broadening the stream of consciousness by means of 
muffled external impressions (dimmed lights, soft 
music, etc.) render a great many more things than 
usual capable of entering consciousness. In the ab- 
sence of strong external stimuli with which is nor- 
mally associated the feeling of reality, the less in- 
tense mental states called images are enabled to 
enter consciousness. The external conditions of 
the mediumistic seance are as if planned to evoke 
the free associations of all the persons concerned. 
These free associations are the various types of 
mental imagery. In addition to that the feeling of 
reality being like other feelings susceptible of being 
detached from one idea and reattached to others is 
most likely in such circumstances to dissociate it- 
self from the monotonous sameness of the sitting 
still and being quiet of the seance and reassociate 
itself with the mental images which are in this 
physical setting in a most favourable situation for 
emerging from the unconscious (where they exist 
in the form of indefinite wishes for self-aggrandize- 
ment) and appearing in consciousness where they 
are immediately seized by the expectant and other- 
wise under-exercised feeling of reality. 

It must not be considered necessary that the 
thoughts, occurring in the sitters amid the undi- 
rected circumstances of the seance, should occur 
in the form of visual images or of auditory images 
or of the images of any of the other sense qualities. 
The thoughts may occur merely as verbal thoughts. 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 293 

There are numbers of people who do not have men- 
tal imagery at all or who say they do not, though 
they cannot be accused of not having ideas. In 
such persons the idea is practically only a symbol 
in the form of a word or a verbal judgment or 
proposition. But even in such people the word, 
which alone comes into consciousness, is naturally 
backed by the visual, auditory or other image. 
Those whose thought is carried on in most abstract 
and word-symbolic form and whose train of thought 
is thus not unlike the flight of an aeroplane, have 
yet to come to earth between flights and in so doing 
inevitably land on a concrete basis of one or other 
sense impression. 

It is quite probable on the contrary that the aver- 
age human thinks in terms of sights and sounds and 
other sensations which under the conditions appro- 
priate for the revery state he can mentally see and 
hear, feel and touch. The abstract thinker also in- 
evitably thinks in terms of concrete sense qualities 
of which, however, he says he is unable to become 
conscious. 

The sum-total of human experience is first the 
external sensations with which is associated the 
internal feeling of reality, and second the images 
or ideas of internal origin with which this feeling 
of reality is not ordinarily associated. But in 
many people this reality feeling has a faint and 
tenuous existence which is associated with mental 
imagery. I have elsewhere noted (Chap. I) that, 
as we function as an integrated organic totality in 



294 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

perceiving the impressions made on us by external 
stimuli, it is not less true that the integration is 
maintained between the images and the just as 
specific, though much fainter, feeling of reality. 

It does not require much strain of the reasoning 
ability of any of us to see that the circumstances 
of the mediumistic seance are such as to increase 
the amount of reality feeling available for being 
associated with images in direct proportion as the 
amount of reality feeling is released from the im- 
pressions received through external stimuli. The 
images become more real in proportion to the faint- 
ness and diminished intensity of the external sen- 
sations. The less coming from outside the more 
will come from inside and vice versa. 

§ 4. Transfer of Reality Feeling 

Therefore if the lights are turned low actual 
sight will lose its feeling of reality and visual im- 
ages will attract to themselves the same feelings of 
reality. If actual sounds are excluded as far as 
possible, the auditory images will appropriate the 
residue of reality feeling remaining from the actual 
sounds made in the seance chamber and filtering 
into it from the out-door world. If the sitters re- 
main motionless for a half an hour it is highly un- 
likely that mental images of cutaneous sensations 
will not arise and occasion the cold breeze felt 
emanating from a Palladino or the " cobweb " sen- 
sation on the face, which is said to occur to the 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 295 

medium when the materialization phenomena ap- 
pear. 

The -reality of these things is, however, only the 
amount of reality feeling released from actual ex- 
ternal sensations which are diminished as far as 
possible in the spiritualistic seances. The reality 
of these things is the reality feeling transferred 
from actual external sensations to the images of 
one sense quality or another. This transference 
is quite a common experience as we have seen else- 
where (Chap. I, Sec. 6). Transferences of emo- 
tions from one idea to another are a universal phe- 
nomenon. Hate or love is transferred from one 
object to another. Liking is transferred from a 
certain food, milk, normally at different ages in 
different people, to another food, bread or meat or 
what not. Our tastes in all mental spheres change 
by virtue of just such transferences of emotions 
from one idea to another. 

Quite similar is the transference of the feeling 
of reality from the actual external sensation to the 
mental image. If only enough of the reality feel- 
ing is transferred from the external one to the men- 
tal one, the latter becomes quite as real for the in- 
dividual in whom the transference takes place as 
was the external impression. All the external cir- 
cumstances are unconsciously arranged with ex- 
actly this aim in view — the transference of the 
reality feeling from external impression to mental 
image. The stage is set for it and the hero is 



296 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

bound to appear. It requires only the most favour- 
able setting to evoke the most wonderful results. 
The psychical researchers have set a trap for a 
spirit and their expectations would be sadly dis- 
appointed if no spirit appeared. The spirit does 
indeed appear — Man's Unconscious Spirit or the 
"spirit" of one's own unconscious; (Maeterlinck's 
Unknown Guest ) — but, expressed in less dramatic 
and more psychological terms, what appear are the 
mental images in the consciousness of the sitter 
and they are called a spirit, as they are immediately 
associated with the floating reality feeling, which 
is quite uncomfortable if it cannot fasten itself to 
anything. Or the words of the medium appear, and 
are taken as the manifestation of a " spirit." 

Man's Unconscious Spirit then is the only spirit 
there is that, by scientific methods, can be proved 
to exist — the " spirit " or personality or group 
of them, according to the way one cares to look at 
it. This is not saying that there may not be some- 
thing that may be called " spirit," not yet demon- 
strable or definable by science, but is only saying 
that " spirit " as expressed or described in the 
spiritistic literature does not fit in any scientific 
category now known. To call the outgivings of 
different lower levels of the mind of a single in- 
dividual organism spirits is a comprehensible, if 
not an artistic, metaphor. To say that they are or 
may become discarnate is absolutely unwarrant- 
able. To attribute to them powers over matter 
is infinitely worse from the purely scientific view- 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 297 

point, however beautiful and desirable it may be 
from any other. 

This then is all Man's Unconscious Spirit means 
or can mean ; that the memories in the apparently 
illimitable storehouse of the unconscious of a single 
individual may be awakened and brought into con- 
sciousness in systems that resemble the integrations 
of the conscious life of almost any other individual 
human ; that these systems have been so long buried 
in the apparent oblivion of the unconscious as to be 
unrecognizable to consciousness; that, being un- 
recognizable they are taken as the thoughts of other 
personalities; that the apparent continuity of the 
conscious ego is such that these other personalities 
are rejected as being the same as the conscious ego 
now re-experiencing them; and that these foreign 
seeming thought systems, that are nevertheless part 
and parcel of the organism of the ego in question, 
are thereupon regarded as the personalities now 
surviving of other ego-organisms that may have dis- 
integrated yesterday or thousands of years ago. 

§ 5. Relativity of Images 

This relativity principle between the power of 
internal images and external stimuli should make 
the psychical researcher, if he took it into account, 
very careful about the evidence of the senses at 
any seance or in any circumstances where he is 
looking for the unusual. Under the circumstances 
recommended for the " formation " of a " circle " of 
spiritists are that the room should be quiet and not 



298 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

brightly lighted, in a high and dry air, and that 
flowers should be in the room " as their presence " 
(I quote from a manual for would-be spiritists) " is 
said to attract spirits in a peculiar manner." 1 

It is a common fact of even conscious psychology 
that odours have a very high associative power, and 
there are few flowers without fragrance of some 
sort. I have given elsewhere (Chap. V, Sec. 16) an 
account of the power that the odour of a small blot 
of ink had to break into my consciousness while I 
was reading a book one summer evening. All these 
recommendations for forming a spiritistic circle of 
people are such as would lower the bars ordinarily 
up against impressions of faint intensity on the one 
hand and on the other also permit the images that 
at such times crowd into the stream of conscious- 
ness to rank well in intensity, i. e., to be reasso- 
ciated with the reality feeling that normally accom- 
panies the actual physical stimuli. 

Therefore the unconscious wish', which, through 
the mechanism of projection elsewhere described, 
launches upon the external world the qualities of 
sense that constitute its chief or special gratifica- 
tion — the unconscious wish is under such circum- 
stances much more likely to be in a position to ex- 
ternalize itself in a mental image which will be 
taken for a real external perception. Many of the 
persons taking part in spiritistic seances are not in 
the least introspective and the attention to images 

1 Carrington : Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop 
Them. N. Y., 1920. 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 299 

which is the habit of introspection is an absolutely 
new experience for them. Therefore it would be a 
very unsafe thing to take their testimony as to 
what they saw or heard. It would require for the 
best evidence a person who had made a thorough 
study of his mental imagery, and who could be 
trusted to differentiate between his images and his 
sensations. This requisition will be taken up in 
greater detail in Chapter X. 

Another spiritistic writer who better under- 
stands the scientific requirements of the situation is 
Mr. J. Arthur Hill who in his Spiritualism (pp. 
127, 128) says: " One of the principal difficulties in 
the way of admitting an element of supernormality 
— whether telepathy, clairvoyance or communica- 
tion from the dead — is the unknown reach of sub- 
liminal memory. . . . Great care is necessary as to 
what we say to sensitives who are helping us in ex- 
perimentation, also close knowledge of their lives, 
their reading, their associations in order to esti- 
mate the probability or improbability of this or 
that piece of knowledge ever having reached them 
through normal channels." This is the proper at- 
titude but it is not strong enough, due probably to 
the writer's being unacquainted with the extreme 
reach of the psychoanalytic sounding line which, as 
I have elsewhere mentioned, has brought up mem- 
ories after thirty years of oblivion and made them 
live with dramatic vividness in the consciousness 
of the person being analysed. 



CHAPTER X 

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 

§ 1. The Personal Factor in Science 

When we look at the progress that has been 
made in science and think of the fact that this 
advance has come, in spite of the many antagonisms 
between men of science, we are impressed more and 
more with the fact that the personal element has 
existed in all the controversies abont various the- 
ories of mind and matter, and considering this 
strife about precedence and the professional jeal- 
ousy and the envy, and the acrimony with which 
some have defended their own and opposed others' 
theories, we cannot but regret that this has been 
so, and we cannot but wish that this emotional life, 
this introjection and projection of feelings had not 
been there to diminish the value of the concrete re- 
sults obtained. They would have been so much 
greater if there had not been so much personal 
friction involved in getting them — a deflection of 
libido which has greatly detracted from the amount 
and quality of the results. 

This lessening of the amount of human energy 
devoted to strictly scientific pursuits due to the 
amount of it wasted on controversial matters, is 
something entirely due to the unconscious habit of 

300 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 301 

all men, including men of science, to think accord- 
ing to the pleasure-pain principle instead of the 
reality principle. It is the operation of the former 
solely that causes polemics and controversies. And 
I cannot but think that much of the energy devoted 
to psychical research is actuated or diverted into 
that direction by the fancied pleasure it would be to 
prove scientifically the extra-corporeal existence of 
personal consciousness. The psychical researchers 
virtually say to scientists, " We admit that you say 
that there is no proof, but we are going to take 
your own methods and show you that you could 
have demonstrated this yourselves long before. 
The very principles you say are unquestionably 
against our evidence we will use to show that you 
are mistaken." 

In this connection I should like to quote S. 
Ferenczi (Contributions to Psycho- Analysis, p. 
217). He says: 

"Unconscious affects (emotions), however, may 
falsify the truth not only in psychology but also in 
all other sciences. . . . Every one who works in 
Science should first submit himself to a methodical 
psychoanalysis. 

" The advantages that would accrue to Science 
from this deepened self-knowledge on the part of 
the scientist are evident. An enormous amount of 
power for work, which is now wasted on infantile 
controversies and priority disputes, could be put at 
the disposal of more serious aims. The danger of 
projecting into Science as a generally valid theory 



302 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

peculiarities of one's own personality' (Freud) 
would be much less. The hostile manner also in 
which, even nowadays, new unusual ideas or sci- 
entific propositions are received when put forward 
by unknown authors, unsupported by any authori- 
tative personality, would give way to a more un- 
prejudiced testing by reality. I will go so far as 
to maintain that, if this rule of self -analysis were 
observed, the development of the various sciences, 
which today is an endless series of energy-wasting 
revolutions and reactions, would pursue a much 
smoother yet a more profitable and accelerated 
course." 

As an illustration of this I would mention the 
history of homeopathy, during which there has de- 
veloped an enormous amount of scientific observa- 
tion on the mental and physical effects of various 
drugs on the human system, a mass of material 
invaluable to humanity, which, partly due to the 
opposition of the " regular " school of medicine, is 
still undigested and practically unavailable. But 
it is also partly due to the extravagant claims made 
by the homeopathists themselves, claims paralleled 
in their inclusiveness by osteopathists, by chiro- 
practors, by mental healers and by Christian Sci- 
entists, all of whom have discovered a grain of 
truth, but have presented it in such a way as to 
antagonize rather than to gain the sympathy of 
others, who are with equal zeal, concerned in the 
same pursuit of studying, in their own narrow way, 
to ameliorate human ills. 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 303 

§ 2. Exclusion of Unconscious Factor 

So it is from this point of view no more than rea- 
sonable to point out to the psychical researchers a 
source of error which perhaps they have overlooked 
and to say that until this is removed they will 
hardly succeed in convincing those whom it is most 
to their interest to convince. 

If a medium should be adequately analysed by a 
thoroughly scientific analyst of the Freudian school 
and after years of patient investigation on the part 
of the analyst and training and study on the part 
of the medium, after this really scientific investiga- 
tion, the medium still could produce " levitations " 
and " spirit " photographs, and was not himself 
convinced that all his conscious and unconscious 
utterances emanated directly or indirectly from his 
own unconscious, then and not until then would sci- 
ence be justified in giving serious attention to what 
now seem to be exceptions to universally valid laws 
of matter. But this has never been done, and it is 
an essential requisition for anything that could 
rightly be called a scientific proof. 

There are perfectly good reasons why this has 
not been sought by the medium himself, for what- 
ever psychical peculiarities he has, whether they be 
normal or abnormal qualities, are never such as to 
cause him much friction with his environment. By 
the people anxious for spiritual aggrandizement the 
medium is treated with honour. From such people 
he receives a rich reward for his hypersensibility, ( 



304 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

which if not directly pecuniary is still material 
value (e. g., Home). I have naturally no criticism 
to make of the mediums who sincerely believe in 
their powers. The frauds have been detected in 
goodly numbers, and it is to the credit of the So- 
cieties for Psychical Research that they have in- 
stantly repudiated a medium when they have found 
him guilty of any indirection. But the sincere and 
honest mediums who take themselves most seriously 
and never consciously resort to any ruse, are quite 
as likely to be self-deceived as are their adherents, 
because we are all alike swayed by our unconscious 
wishes for aggrandizement of the ego. Only the 
smallest possible number of us at present are in a 
position definitely to be able to state that our utter- 
ances or the visions we see or the phantom sounds 
we hear are not the results of the activities of our 
own unconscious minds. 

Therefore I should add to the requirements for 
really scientific proof of spiritistic phenomena the 
further requirement that, if the activities of the 
unconscious are to be rigidly excluded in the proof 
of spiritism in any of its manifestations, the in- 
vestigators themselves will have to be analysed. It 
will be as necessary for truly scientific work as 
that not only the person operated on in a surgical 
operation, but even the doctors and nurses be thor- 
oughly antisepticised. But while I might have 
hesitated somewhat in making the negative state- 
ment that no medium has ever been analysed up to 
the point of remembering and recognizing all his 






SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 305 

former sense experiences, I shall have no hesita- 
tion whatever in asserting that no medium has ever 
been analysed and after his analysis been witnessed 
by a group of thoroughly analysed spectators. In 
fact I am almost certain that at the present time 
such a situation is a physical impossibility. For 
as thorough an analysis of an individual human as 
has ever been made to date, several hundred sit- 
tings are necessary, and at the rate of three or four 
a week the whole proceeding for one individual 
might take a year or two. A skilled analyst there- 
fore would have to spend a couple of years devot- 
ing all his time to the research work on the uncon- 
scious of the medium and the four or five specta- 
tors who were going to witness his performances 
subsequent to his and their analysis. And I am 
sure such thoroughgoing preparations for scientific 
proof of spiritism have never been carried out. 

But they would have to be, in order to afford 
strictly scientific proof of spiritistic phenomena. 
To carry out these specifications to the letter, viz. : 
to take the best believed medium on record and pre- 
pare him by thorough psychoanalytic treatment and 
to train by a similar method four or five competent 
witnesses to inspect his mediumistic performances, 
if any, after his analysis, would be the only con- 
ceivable way to exclude the unconscious factor in 
the process. 

And even these extensive precautions, not against 
fraud, but against self-deception on the part of both 
medium and witnesses, would be a no more labori- 



306 MAX'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

ous procedure than many of those scientific methods 
which have produced things of every day use from 
666 to the mazda lamp. I cannot say that scien- 
tists who have performed Herculean labours in pure 
and applied science have not expressed themselves 
as believing in spiritism, but I think I can justly 
say that such scientists have failed to apply to 
psychical research work the same year-long and 
indefatigable persistence that they have given to 
material things. 

In this we clearly see the activity of the uncon- 
scious wish on the part of the scientists who have 
won their laurels by making investigations into the 
constitution of matter. They have not come out 
saying that their researches into matter convinced 
them of the existence of spirit in order to explain 
matter. But they have left their laboratories or 
doffed their laboratory habit of thought and en- 
tertained mediums in their laboratories, remitting 
for a while their strictly scientific work and yielded 
finally in their old age to the constant and increas- 
ing pressure of the unconscious wishes of them- 
selves and their acquaintances. We cannot but be- 
lieve that they would not have come out for spirit- 
ualism if they had not in a sense come out of their 
laboratories for relaxation, fatigued, and naturally 
so, after a lifetime of unremitting labour. It is a 
significant fact, too, that some of the most prom- 
inent advocates of spiritistic phenomena have been 
doubters in their youth, like Conan Doyle, and have 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 307 

yielded to the pressure of their own and others' un- 
conscious in later life. 

All the positive advances in and contributions 
to science have involved not less, but more compli- 
cated research than that outlined above as a pre- 
requisite for the scientific proof of spiritism. To 
each one of countless scientific discoveries and in- 
ventions years of toil on the part of one or two men 
have been devoted. To the present condition of 
the automobile, the aeroplane, the telephone, the 
wireless, years of co-ordinated endeavour of many 
men have contributed, and the result is definite and 
tangible and familiar — not a matter of belief but 
an actual fact. The statements of the believers in 
spiritualism have no such backing. For the appro- 
priately constituted mind belief is not only easy, it 
is inevitable. " Thou reasonest well, Plato ! It 
must be so." But we must not forget for a moment 
that belief is the verbal or act expression of the 
unconscious wish. 

§ 3. Belief a Wish 

In order to make this clear if possible we shall 
have to consider somewhat at length the origin of 
belief in the unconscious and the nature of the un- 
conscious itself as it is manifested in the percep- 
tions and actions, not merely of the mentally dis- 
ordered but of those who are absolutely normal and 
wholesome healthy humans. 

We all believe what we unconsciously wish. The 



308 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

belief expressed consciously in word or deed is the 
perceptible expression of the imperceptible impulse. 
For our beliefs we do not need and do not want 
any scientific proof no matter how much we may 
happen to say we do, or say that we cannot believe 
what is not proved or patent to the senses. 

A consideration of the origin of beliefs, whether 
religious or political, psychological or philological, 
takes us into the study of the nature and origin in 
the individual mind of ideas themselves. I think 
no distinction need be made for psychological pur- 
poses between ideas and things, for to the mind 
everything is an idea and every idea is a thing. 
We have sensations from our internal organs to 
which I have elsewhere given the name of " reality 
feelings " sensations which we experience together 
with certain so-called " external " senses such as 
sight, hearing, tactual impressions, pressure, mo- 
tion, smell, etc. Those " reality feelings " give us 
our orientation, sometimes somewhat defective to be 
sure, in the world of external reality. What ac- 
tually exists, the thing in itself, concerns us only 
as we happen to react to it, and frequently makes 
on us no impression at all of which we are aware. 
But we can infer from our own mental states 
(sights, sounds, etc., feelings and emotions), that 
impressions have been made on our bodies by forces 
of which we are not and never could become directly 
conscious. Furthermore, the fusions and colliga- 
tions of impressions made through the avenues of 
sense are entities that for the most part never enter 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 309 

consciousness at all. We frequently move our en- 
tire body automatically, and particularly when the 
stream of consciousness is narrowed by deep emo- 
tions, or great excitement, and in these situations 
we are led and directed by ideas or groups of ideas 
that are not then in and sometimes do not sub- 
sequently enter, consciousness. 

Now I am aware that, in saying as I did above 
that forces of which we are not and never can be- 
come conscious are having an effect on us, I am lay- 
ing myself open to the charge of admitting spirit- 
ual forces. The forces that work upon us below our 
conscious level may be, it will be said, the disem- 
bodied spirits by which the ether is so copiously 
populated. How can I prove that is not the case? 
But I might reply quite as reasonably : How can it 
be proved that the forces which produce these sub- 
liminal effects are not forces inherent in the men- 
tal content of the individual in question? Why 
may they not just as plausibly be the ideas gen- 
erated, to speak figuratively, by the memories of 
past experiences lying apparently dormant in the 
mind, but yet, as is abundantly proved by psycho- 
analytic research, quite as active and vigorous as 
if they had entered consciousness. For we are not 
to imagine that consciousness alone gives life to 
ideas and fusions of thoughts. An unconscious 
idea may be quite as lively as a conscious one, it 
may grow and develop from year to year and never 
once enter consciousness. That an idea occurs to 
consciousness shows that it has acquired in the 



310 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

mind enough force of its own to push its way up- 
ward, taking concrete sense-impression form as it 
emerges. But the occurrence of an idea to my 
mind is no proof that it has come ready-made from 
any other intelligence, bodied or disembodied. It 
may quite as well be the product of my own mind 
as that of any other person's, and is much more 
likely to be my own thought composed in my own 
unconscious than it is to be an idea transmitted by 
some disembodied spirit. 

It is thus evident that the source of any idea has 
to be scientifically investigated with the more care, 
the greater its possibilities are of being derived 
either from the unconscious of the particular per- 
son having it or from some external source beyond 
the ordinary distance from which any average im- 
pression is made on the sensorium by the external 
world. 

If I can show that the unconscious is an inex- 
haustible treasure-house of ideas of all possible 
kinds, combinations and permutations of ideas that 
have once been sense impressions received from the 
external world, I shall in so doing show that the 
origin of ideas purporting to come from disem- 
bodied spirits may quite as well be within the ego 
as without it. 

All the more, then, shall we have to have it finally 
decided that such and such an idea could not pos- 
sibly have come from the unconscious before we can 
say that we have scientific proof of its extraneous 
origin. 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 311 

The unconscious is conceived as an absolutely 
faithful record of all impressions of the individual 
from his birth ( or even before his birth — even in 
his intra-uterine existence) on to the time when the 
idea in question pops into his head supposedly for 
the first time. 

If the medium were analysed he would then have 
it made clear to him that all the trance utterances 
are but emanations from his own mind. The fash- 
ion is for the medium to repudiate this idea, because 
at present the fashion is to pay big rewards or hom- 
age to mediums. Therefore I say that the medium 
or any person through whom the manifestations of 
external " spirits " are made have never been ade- 
quately analysed to show the actual origin of the 
ideas issuing in the seance. I affirm that this 
origin could be found. Also that it has not been 
found because the personal motives against having 
it discovered are so strong, emanating, as they do, 
from the same source as the trance utterances. 

But two approximations to the analysis of a me- 
dium have been made. One of these had at the 
time of this writing not been printed and is there- 
fore unavailable in its scientific form. The out- 
lines of it are, however, suggested in what follows. 
The other is the case of Elsa Barker. 

§ 4. Dr. Q ? s Case 

The nearest approach to the analysis of a medium 
that has at the same time the merit of being truly 
scientific is the following one of Dr. N. Q. It is 



312 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

naturally quite negative in results, from the spirit- 
istic point of view. 

A young woman becoming interested in the ouija 
board, when the recent fad struck her town, amused 
herself with it as the others did. She was of an 
aristocratic family, among the possessions of which 
handed down from some ancestors was a copper 
tray about which there was a tradition that in some 
way its integrity was connected with the welfare 
of the family itself. Miss X. put the question to 
the ouija board, " What shall I do with the tray? 
Shall I put it in storage? " and got the reply, " No." 

It should be noted that this story covers quite a 
period of time and that, after this interesting reply 
of the ouija board, Miss X. learned automatic writ- 
ing in which she became skilled enough to dispense 
with the ouija board entirely. 

Inquiring who the intelligence was who was com- 
municating, the hand wrote " Eob Taylor," and 
said that he lived at the Yorktown Hotel. To test 
this Miss X. called up the hotel and to her great 
surprise found that they knew him. He was a well 
known craft worker in metal and had lived there; 
but had recently died. She continued her auto- 
matic writing. 

Asking the " spirit " of Mr. Taylor if he could 
not give her still more proof of his continued ex- 
istence by appearing in visible form before her, her 
hand wrote, " Look in the dark doorway on the 
other side of the room." She did so and, to her 
amazement, she clearly saw a tall figure with soft 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 313 

hat and Van Dyke beard, and with a cape on — a 
very artistic looking person. 

Being of a truly scientific mind she tested this 
vision by going to a friend of Taylor's who, she 
knew, took a great many photographs, and asked 
him if he had any of Taylor. 

" I think so," he said, and produced a pile of 
prints. " See if you can pick him out." 

She turned them over one by one and finally held 
up one. " This is the man I saw in my vision in the 
doorway." 

" That's Kob Taylor," said his friend. 

She went home and continued her automatic 
writing. She asked Mr. Taylor what she should 
do with the family copper tray in order best to pre- 
serve it. Through her hand he said, " Colour it ! " 

" But," she said, " I know nothing about colour- 
ing copper. How shall I go about it? " 

" Go," the hand wrote, " to the drug store and 
buy an ounce of powder that I always used for such 
purposes. It is called Liv . . ." The rest of this 
word was illegible. 

She went to the drug store, asking if Mr. Taylor 
was not in the habit of buying some of his materials 
there. 

" Yes, madam, can we supply you with any- 
thing? " 

" I wanted to get an ounce of the powder such 
as Mr. Taylor used for colouring copper trays." 

The clerk immediately suggested sal ammoniac. 

As he did so Miss X. was distinctly aware that 



314 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

the spirit of Rob Taylor was there, standing by her 
in the drug store before the counter, and indicating 
in some mysterious manner that this was not the 
proper chemical. 

She said: "Is this the chemical he always used? 
Did he not sometimes use some other? " 

" Well, yes. Come to think of it, he did some- 
times use a very peculiar chemical. I'll get some 
if we have it. It isn't often called for." 

In a moment he returned with another package. 
It was labelled " Liver of Sulphur." 

These automatic writings and the testing out of 
them went to the extent that Miss X.'s friends be- 
gan to think her quite uncanny. One of them, a 
Mrs. Y., also evincing a truly scientific spirit, got 
her to consent to test the thing out further, and 
with the help of the best brains in the country, so 
she went to Dr. N. Q. 

He hypnotized her and in the hypnosis she re- 
called three separate incidents which she had en- 
tirely forgotten, and gave Dr. Q. a detailed account 
of them. 

The first was the memory of reading in a news- 
paper about the death of Rob Taylor. The obit- 
uary gave his picture and told that he was a very 
successful art worker, also that he lived in the 
Yorktown Hotel. 

The second was the memory of an occasion when 
she had herself gone one evening with friends to 
dine at the Yorktown. In the lobby they noticed a 
very distinguished looking individual with long 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 315 

cape, Van Dyke beard and soft felt hat. She asked 
one of her companions who that man was. 

" It's Rob Taylor, the craft worker. I thought 
you knew him." 

The third memory was of some copper work done 
in the convent school where Miss X. went as a girl. 
She remembered quite clearly that one of the chem- 
icals used in the work they did there was labelled 
Liver of Sulphur. 

Miss X.'s automatic writing was thus entirely 
explained. Every bit of information that she got 
from the " spirit " and that was so dramatically 
corroborated, was in her own unconscious mental 
storehouse and was released through her automatic 
writing. Every bit of it was accounted for. 
Among other things Dr. Q. looked for and found 
the very newspaper account of Rob Taylor's death. 

Surely it is a scientific necessity to exclude the 
unconscious factor. 

§ 5. Elsa Barker 

This lady says that in 1912 while in Paris she 
was " strongly impelled to take up a pencil and 
write, though what I was to write about I had no 
idea. Yielding to the impulse, my hand was seized 
as if from the outside, and a remarkable message 
of a personal nature came, followed by the signa- 
ture ' X.' " This man was known to have died in 
Los Angeles February 21, 1912, David P. Hatch 
being his name. He was supposed to be the " con- 
trol " in the writing of two volumes : Letters from a 



316 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

Living Dead Man (1914) and War Letters from the 
Living Dead Man (1915). 

In the introduction to the War Letters which 
were written in 1915, about the time when she says 
she first became interested in psychoanalysis, she 
writes as follows : 

" When made aware of the presence of ' X ' I 
take a pencil and a notebook, as any other amanu- 
ensis would, and by an effort of will, now easy from 
long practice, I still the activity of my objective 
mind, until there is no thought or shadow of a 
thought in it. Then into the brain itself come the 
words, which flow out without conscious effort at 
the point of the pencil. It is exactly as if I heard 
the dictation with a single auditory instrument, 
like a small and very sensitive sphere, in the centre 
of the brain. 

" I never know at the beginning of a sentence 
how it will end. I never know whether the sen- 
tence I am writing will be the last or if two thou- 
sand words will follow it. I simply write on, in a 
state of voluntary negativity, until the impression 
of personality described above leaves suddenly. 
Then no more words come. . . . 

" The question will naturally arise in the mind of 
the sceptical reader (it has in mine *), whether my 
own subconscious mind has not itself dictated the 
following War Letters from the Living Dead Man 
in the attempt to explain a world tragedy which 
would have seemed impossible two years ago. 

i Dated Sept. 15, 1915. 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 317 

" But from my long experience in writing for X 
and from the fact that during two years I had not 
written for him except on two or three unimportant 
occasions, though often thinking of him, and from 
my acquired habit of minute observation of super- 
normal phenomena, I now feel safe in assuming 
that I know the difference between the actual pres- 
ence of ' X ' and my own imagination of him, my 
reminiscence of him, or even the suggestion of his 
presence from another's mind. 

"... I freely welcome every logical argument 
against the belief that these letters are what they 
purport to be; but placing those arguments in op- 
position to the evidence which I have of the gen- 
uineness of them, the affirmations outweigh the 
denials, and I accept them." 

In 1919 appeared the Last Letters from the Liv- 
ing Dead Man, in the introduction to which the au- 
tomatist says that for a year she has studied psy- 
choanalysis fourteen hours a day, that her own 
belief in immortality seems ineradicable, and that 
science is not to be blamed if she has not lost 
through the analytical process her instinctive belief 
in individual immortality. But she clearly shows 
that scientific proof of it is lacking. 

" I was torn by pity for those who were suffer- 
ing, and after years of war nearly every one was 
suffering ; but I wanted to be at the front with the 
Red Cross, and my health would not permit me to 
go. I could help various war committees, but I 
could not go to my tortured and beloved France — 



318 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

to be perhaps an added burden, should I break down 
altogether. 

" The only escape from this conflict was in ab- 
struse studies, studies where pure mind can work. 
So I seriously took up Analytical Psychology, in 
which I had been mildly interested since 1915. 
Some 14 hours a day for a year I studied, some 
of the time with a teacher, some of the time alone. 
I burrowed under the theories of the three great 
schools, and synthetized them, after my fashion. 
I had rather an active mind to experiment on — my 
own. The l resistance,' so-called, had been broken 
down by the teacher. 

" My present line of life (and through the anal- 
ysis of my dreams I have means of knowing what 
it is) points to the resumption of my original lit- 
erary work, poetry, fiction and essays, and to the 
exclusion, so far as possible, of everything that 
would deflect me from that course. ' 

" My own belief in immortality seems ineradic- 
able. I did not know that until it was tested out. 
But we must always remember that our personal 
belief is not absolute evidence of the truth of what 
we believe — at least until we shall have examined 
all the psychological roots of the belief, and in the 
present state of our knowledge that is well-nigh im- 
possible. 

" I have touched upon analytical psychology in 
this introduction because I am so constituted that 
I cannot publish this last volume of my automatic 
writings without indicating my point of view, with 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 319 

the same frankness as in former introductions. 
Please do not blame science because I have not 
lost through the analytic process my instinctive be- 
lief in individual immortality. I assure you it has 
not been the fault of science. 

" So having found a well whose waters were re- 
freshing, I note the fact — and pass on." 

Her experience in automatic writing is strikingly 
similar to my own ordinary composition. The gen- 
eral idea of a book or a chapter or a paragraph is 
in my mind as a sort of indefinite feeling which is 
to become definite in the sentence or the paragraph. 
But I can quite as truly say that at the beginning 
of a sentence I never know how it will end, because 
by " know " in this sense I should have to mean 
" be conscious of the specific words " with which 
the sentence is to end. I could not know that in 
this sense because I should have to be conscious of 
a whole long spoken sentence seriatim. When I 
write I hear the words as auditory mental images 
in my mind's ear, and, if they come too fast, I can- 
not write them. In no case can I be said to be 
conscious of all of them at once. At any point in 
the sentence I do not have in consciousness more 
than four or five words, so that if the sentence con- 
tains twenty words the consciousness of the last 
five words puts the first fifteen out of conscious- 
ness. This does not mean that I do not have feel- 
ings of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of 
the last five to the other fifteen. For the last five 
have been chosen from the unconscious by the un- 



320 MAX'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

conscious for the special purpose of being fit and 
suitable for the first fifteen. But while writing the 
first five I am unconscious of the last five, although 
I might be said to be more or less aware of what 
they are going to be likp. 

So that between the most conscious possible form 
of writing which the ordinary person does when he 
writes a letter, and the absolutely automatic writ- 
ing (done either awake, but not looking at or read- 
ing the finger motions, or in a trance) there is no 
difference in kind but only in degree. Even if I 
know what I want to say, I am, just as much as is 
an automatist, unconscious of what words I am 
going to say it in. In this sense my writing is as 
automatic as is that of the Letters from a Living 
Dead Man, and I should be quite as unwilling to 
ascribe anything I wrote to the control of a spirit 
as I should any of the so-called spirit messages con- 
veyed through the now very numerous automatic 
writers. 

Excepting the case of the other automatic writer 
mentioned in the preceding section this is the only 
case on record where the automatism, which had 
every mark of being controlled by a disembodied 
spirit, has been frankly admitted to be the work 
of the unconscious. This case of the writer of the 
Letters from the Living Man is the more interesting 
from the fact that she began by being sceptical, 
was convinced by her own feelings and by the in- 
ternal evidence of the letters themselves that the 
latter were veridical; but after psychoanalysis, 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 321 

while she declares her belief in immortality un- 
shaken, she resolves to do no more automatic writ- 
ing. If she were not now practically convinced 
that as communications they have no scientific 
value she would certainly have gone on with them, 
for in coherence and in beauty of style, in their 
actual mental content and elevated spiritual char- 
acter, they are unsurpassed among automatic writ- 
ings. 

Furthermore she is something of a clairvoyant 
too, saying that while in New York she " saw the 
shelling of Scarborough at the hour when it oc- 
curred.'' It is significant that she only incident- 
ally notes this fact in her introduction. 

But she says she is a w T riter of fiction, poetry and 
essays and desires to devote her time to these in the 
future, showing by this attitude the real value she 
places on the Letters as scientific proofs entirely 
apart from any value they may have as works of 
the imagination. 

It would be most desirable if all the other auto- 
matists and psychical researchers would spend 
fourteen hours a day on psychoanalytic studies for 
a year ! 

§ 6. The Value of Phantasy 

Finally we must conclude that the attempt to in- 
ject the pleasure-pain, phantasying activities of the 
unconscious mind into science is a wholly unscien- 
tific procedure. The only way the phantasying ac- 
tivity can enter scientific work is the way it has 



322 MAX'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

in psychoanalysis, namely by being studied as a 
mental phenomenon quite on an equality with all 
other mental phenomena. It becomes the mate- 
rial of scientific work but it cannot perform sci- 
entific work. That is, however, exactly what spir- 
itists are trying to do with it. The phantasies of 
the human unconscious can no more be made into 
the laws of cause and effect, than can the amoeba 
studied by a biologist be turned into a biologist. 
The content of the visual and auditory imagination, 
consisting of mental pictures and words and other 
sounds can no more logically be regarded as ab- 
stract principles than can a picture or a sonata be 
proved always to arouse the same emotions in all 
who see or hear. But that is what the spiritist is 
attempting to do. 

The collective phantasy of races and nations has 
produced racial religions and national creeds, and 
the influence of these has been great and beneficial 
at times. But there has always been the same an- 
tagonism between religion and science that there is 
between the phantasy in the individual and reality 
thinking. The antagonism need never lead to rup- 
ture. It may be as advantageous and really as nec- 
essary as that between antagonistic muscles in the 
human frame and as inevitable as emotional ambi- 
valence. It is only the attempt of misguided 
thinkers to reconcile them, or of either one of the 
antagonists to do without the other, that leads to 
disaster. 

Therefore it seems to an impartial observer a pity 



SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS 323 

that belief should try to force knowledge, or that 
knowledge should be thought by any one to under- 
mine belief. It seems like the annihilation of be- 
lief to have belief invoke the support of knowledge. 
Whether belief or knowledge be on the higher 
plane, they are on two different planes and they 
never can coincide. The very fact that the spiritist 
calls for the help of science to fortify his belief is 
a proof that his belief is weakening, and that he 
feels it needs support. The true believer is the one 
whose mental processes go on entirely on the plane 
of phantasy. He is independent of knowledge, and 
should remain so. It looks much as if he could 
never get the knowledge which would satisfy him, 
particularly if he begins the search for it late in 
life. On the other hand, the man of science will 
never bother with belief, so long as he remains truly 
scientific. It means nothing to him and is abso- 
lutely foreign to the plane of his reality thinking. 
Except, of course, that a man may be truly sci- 
entific in all his thinking along his special line of 
research and be quite the reverse in any other line. 
Such a man, however, ought not to try to make two 
parallels meet, but to realize that in this respect he 
is himself a double personality. 

I have mentioned the different values which the 
two kinds of thinking have, and I shall not be so 
rash as to say that one of them is greater than the 
other, a statement which seems to be as futile as 
that either man or woman is more necessary than 
the other for the perpetuation of the race. The 



321 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

grand fallacy is the failure to recognize that neither 
the reality principle nor the pleasure-pain principle 
can be entirely dispensed with in human life. 
There is an undesirable preponderance of the lat- 
ter even in the highest civilizations and the spir- 
itists are trying to add to it, and to enhance its 
value by maintaining that it is the true reality 
thinking. If true scientists did the corresponding 
thing they too would be maintaining that in reality 
thinking was your only true phantasy, but I have 
yet to see them doing that. 

No one with clear vision doubts the value of 
phantasy if it does not try to disguise itself as 
absolute and literal truth. Its value in art of all 
types is unquestioned. It produces poems, pic- 
tures, symphonies and altruistic conduct and is one 
of the legitimate expressions of emotion and the 
necessary employments of man's excess energies. 
Only let it not attempt to control the reality prin- 
ciple of conscious thought or to offer itself as proof 
of things that really do not exist. The wish is for 
what is not. The wish is the ideal representation 
of the non-existent. When this non-existent comes 
into being the wish is automatically transferred to 
some other non-existent ideal. We might almost 
say to the psychical researchers : " Do not try so 
hard to prove what we believe. If you do, and 
we consequently know it, we shall have to find 
something else to believe, that we do not know." 



CHAPTER XI 

PRESENT STATUS 

§ 1. The Medium's Material Reward 

About the present status of psychical research 
there is really little to be said. It is on the wrong 
track, looking for what does not exist, or could not 
be proved to exist, if it did. Mediums will be forth- 
coming in the future as they have in the past, and 
will refuse to be analysed because unconsciously 
they are aware of the unconscious deception that 
they innocently practise. If a medium, who is 
" taken up " by a coterie of rich men and knows 
that it will mean to him a fortune of several hun- 
dred thousand dollars, should allow himself to be 
analysed and let it be scientifically proved, as Miss 
X did, that all his messages were messages from 
his own unconscious storehouse of memory images, 
he would be a fool as the world goes. Yet he would 
really be doing more for science than are all the 
automatic writers and crystal gazers who are look- 
ing for proofs that their words and visions could 
not be the result of previous impressions on their 
nerve and brain substance. 

The material gains of mediumship are very great. 
Not only are the subjective and the objective ego 
augmented in general but in particular the social 
position of the medium himself is greatly advanced. 

325 



326 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

Take for example the famous medium Daniel Hume, 
or Home, whose history is so well told in The New 
Spiritualism. His gifts gave him entrance into the 
best European society and finally settled him per- 
manently in a comfortable English estate, after 
which he ceased his performances. Similarly with 
all the mediums who have been taken up by culti- 
vated circles in this country and in England. 
There will always be a great demand for these 
sensitives as long as there are people who will be- 
lieve in spiritism. It is not the mediums who make 
the spiritists. The spiritists evoke the medium. 

§ 2. Physical Manifestations 

And as for the physical manifestations we shall 
have to say that we have not proved them yet, sci- 
entifically. They fall into two groups, the levita- 
tions, re-percussions, apports and materializations 
supposed to be mediated via special persons, and 
the manifestations said by some to have been re- 
ceived through physical apparatus, entirely inde- 
pendent of human control, such as those of Matla 
and Zaalberg van Zelst of Holland. The latter 
have not yet found scientific approval. Announce- 
ment has been made that Thomas A. Edison is 
working on apparatus for the same purpose. The 
former are, as has already been hinted before in 
this book, without the complication of that type of 
false perception consisting of the association of the 
reality feeling with the mental images of the vari- 
ous senses, chiefly sight, hearing and touch, an 



PRESENT STATUS 327 

association greatly facilitated by the darkness and 
quiet of the seance. They are the only ones that 
would have any scientific value, but they have as 
yet produced nothing. 

§3. What is "Spirit"? 

As far as science today knows, spirit is nothing. 
There is no such thing to be revealed as a force 
operating from without upon real things with any- 
thing more like human intelligence than the swell- 
ing of water before it becomes ice. We might well 
say why should there be? By the " use " of spirits 
what end would be gained in a universe so admir- 
ably, as far as we can see it, operating according 
to absolutely universal and rigid laws? Would 
spirits be able any the better to regulate the human 
body than the laws which do regulate it now? 

But we know quite well, not why should there be 
spirits, but why people imagine there are spirits 
and in just what originates the development of the 
belief in spirits and in immortality, and knowing 
what we do, we might well resent the interpolation 
of spirit into a perfectly well ordered cosmos. 
The only object of " spirit " is to break those laws 
governing Nature, for the benefit of the individual 
when the laws hurt him. It is quite like poetic 
justice that the main object of the psychical re- 
searcher is to try to show the breaks in the even 
working of the laws of the universe carefully dem- 
onstrated by science as it continues calmly and 
steadily its even course laid out for it according 



328 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

to the reality principle. But psychical research 
has never found anything like a break in those uni- 
versal reasons which I trust I have made plain. 
Science is not looking for such breaks, and is not 
likely to find them. 

§ 4. Quality of Content 

A word should be added about the quality of the 
content of the spiritistic messages. Not only are 
they trivial and without the remotest resemblance 
to the grandeur of thought of the bibles of the 
world which contain the phantasy of the races 
backed by the claim of authoritative inspiration; 
not only have they in every instance failed to give 
what would be the most desired by humans, and 
have besides criticized the questioners for wanting 
it ; not only do they represent in general the worst 
utterances of the medium's unconscious mind, 
Avhere the " inspired " writings of all nations and 
races have given the best expression to the ever- 
lasting urge; but it is possible in these spiritistic 
communications to detect the mercenary, the quib- 
bling, the fencing, the indirection of a wild attempt 
to guess out what will please the hearer, without 
any attempt whatever to gain true breadth of vision 
and nobility of thought. 

In this the contrast is such that in the purely 
phantastic literature as distinguished from the 
actual scientific report of facts, we find a wealth of 
imagination and pathos and humour that would 
have to be equalled if not surpassed by the utter- 



PRESENT STATUS 329 

ances of the mediums, if we were to regard them as 
having any true emotional value. The frank ex- 
pressions of phantasy seen in all forms of art have 
a virtue and a strength of their own and perform 
an undeniable social service, whether or not they 
bear the imprimatur of an authoritative inspira- 
tion, but from the entire body of results of spirit- 
istic utterance such value is completely lacking. 
And the attempts to gain the imprimatur of 
science for the unconscious utterances of second- 
rate minds have resulted only in the impartial and 
broad-minded observer being repelled by the 
material produced and, for any enjoyment of the 
phantastic, which in all people is legitimate 
enough, driven to the old artistic paths of litera- 
ture, painting, sculpture, music and poetry. Yet, 
for the deliverances of the spiritistic medium to 
have the same or greater value for modern social 
advancement, they would have to present some- 
thing that would rank with or above the works of 
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Michel Angelo, 
Phidias, Beethoven. How can humanity " on this 
fair mountain leave to feed and batten on this 
moor, " unless they are, as I have elsewhere inti- 
mated, impelled thereto by fear? 

Besides the trivial, ignoble and otherwise repel- 
lent content of the volume after volume of collected 
utterances of mediums, the spiritists themselves 
warn against bad or dangerous messages. But we 
should be no more surprised or terrified by the evil 
that comes out of the unconscious via the medium 



330 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

than that which comes into the consciousness of 
the world in daily acts of violence and hate, if 
only they both be recognized as coming from ex- 
actly the same source. If, on the other hand, we 
were forced to believe that the " bad " messages 
were caused by " evil spirits," we should certainly 
be unhappily situated; we should be in a fair way 
to become terrorized by the thought of what would 
happen if the evil ones gained the upper hand in 
ourselves or in the world at large. 

The " evil " messages are however only an object 
of pity and ridicule when they are recognized as 
merely the dejecta of an individual's unconscious 
mind, and no more important for human welfare, 
or able to do it harm than the ashes dropping from 
a grate. If, then, the ouija board and the crystal 
and the other paraphernalia tap the lower levels of 
a single person's unconscious, the dregs therefrom 
issuing are to be regarded only as curiosities and 
of no vital import unless they accumulate like rub- 
bish and cause disease. Only if we attribute to 
these " messages," be they comforting or distress- 
ing, an origin in a mysterious " spirit " world will 
they appear to us as having any importance or 
power over our lives. But the attributing of any 
sort of power to the stratum of mind producing 
these results would be most illogical in itself, even 
if there were not other much more valid reasons, 
mentioned elsewhere in this volume, for turning 
from these products of the mind's lower levels to 
others much more valuable and constructive. 



PRESENT STATUS 331 

§ 5. Infantility in Civilized Spirit World 

From the fact that the primitive mind projects 
its unconscious wishes into the external world and 
says, though it makes no attempt to prove, that 
there are spirits there that work in accord with his 
own wishes; we should be inclined to suppose that 
the variety of spirits that he imagines inhabiting 
river, tree and mountain, and that he imagines liv- 
ing after death in some Valhalla, or Paradise or 
happy hunting ground, would be an infantile va- 
riety of spirits manifesting infantile characteristics, 
because the act of projection itself is an infantile 
act, in comparison with the more adult attitude 
implied in the reality principle. The pleasure- 
pain principle on which the mechanism of projec- 
tion works is infantile and itself characteristic of 
an infantile state of mind, while only the truly 
adult can be governed solely by the reality princi- 
ple in all his thinking. 

But the world in which, in the view of the primi- 
tive mind, his spirits live, is a truly adult world, 
adult, that is, as far as his experience goes. The 
pleasures which he imagines will be his, after he 
has departed this life, are all those of adults in 
primitive society, mating and /fighting and hunt- 
ing and feasting. 

On the other hand the pleasures imagined by a 
large part of present day civilized humanity are 
those which were the pleasures of childhood before 
the individual became adult. They consist mostly 



332 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

of the exaltation of the father, and represent the 
relation between father and children as of the 
time before there was any conflict between the 
younger and the older generation. Heaven of the 
modern civilized world is where there is absolute 
respect for the father, a state of mind which rep- 
resents the early condition of the child. 

This difference is due to the very early maturing 
of primitive man and the very late maturing of 
civilized man. The prolongation of the infancy 
period in civilized society has long been a matter 
of comment. A modern philosopher has noted 
that an ancient Greek philosopher also called at- 
tention to it. The prolongation of infancy is re- 
garded, and rightly, as the basis on which civiliza- 
tion rests, as it gives a longer period during which 
the experience gathered by ancestors can be com- 
municated to their descendants, and only by means 
of this education can there be so complicated and 
closely interwoven a fabric of society as we have 
today. 

If the primitive instincts of animals and men are 
allowed full expression, the result is a continual 
warfare until the weaker is beaten. One of these 
is the instinct of the male to remove all other males 
in sight and appropriate all the females in the 
flock. This is an instinct making for survival of 
the fittest, because it guarantees the females all 
being impregnated by the strongest male, result- 
ing in the improvement of the qualities of the 
stock, 



PRESENT STATUS 333 

The primitive mental mechanism of projection 
working in minds of primitive people produces the 
adult theology and eschatology of the Happy 
Hunting Ground and the Valhalla. The same 
mechanism in the minds of people of highly civil- 
ized races produces an absolutely infantile the- 
ology. That is because the inborn instincts of men 
have been repressed. They have had to be re- 
pressed because in order to have neighbours to live 
with and to make possible various kinds of co-oper- 
ative activities producing and handling all sorts of 
commodities — in order to have neighbours, you 
have to let them live in the neighbourhood. This is 
how the mechanism of projection has worked in 
primitive and in complicated society. The result 
has been the increase of urban population, the de- 
pendence of people on each other, the evolution of 
huge social organisms and of the " red " element. 
Alongside of the greater phenomena like these, 
spiritualism, as an attempt to give scientific proof 
to a thing quite phantastic is of course of very 
slight relative importance. Of far greater impor- 
tance is it, I think, to give publicity as far as pos- 
sible to the actual causes why there has been so 
spontaneous and so persistent a belief in spirits 
on the one hand ; and, on the other, why the neces- 
sity was felt to prove scientifically their existence 
as intelligences and forces operating independently 
of matter. The wish for a proof is the direct result 
of the fear of death, — a conscious emotion which 
has been repressed into the unconscious. 



334 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT 

§ 6. Reality Thinking 

The principle of reality thinking is the one on 
which all the triumphs of modern science rest, and 
it is to the credit of Mr. Thos. A. Edison, if cor- 
rectly reported in the American Magazine 1 that 
he conceives his experiments in truly scientific 
spirit of expecting nothing definitely, but is never- 
theless willing to accept nothing except as it is 
subject to experimental control, to accept nothing 
in other words, that has been produced so far. 

The reality principle has been that on which 
Mr. Edison has given us his many contributions to 
the convenience and pleasure of present day liv- 
ing, and on which all our present day material 
progress has been made. The fact that present 
day civilization is as unsatisfactory as it is, that 
it shows, indeed, immediate threats of completely 
collapsing is, however, due to the enormous 
potency in the minds of all men, of the pleasure- 
pain principle, that on which as Freud puts it, 
wishes are fulfilled on the hallucinatory path. 
This does not mean that conscious wishes are thus 
projected upon external reality as place names 
were hung on the back of the Elizabethan stage. 
Consciously we realize the vanity of human wishes. 
It is the unconscious wishes that the reality prin- 
ciple, working in the minds of psychoanalysts, has 
shown to be the element in modern society that, 
unless recognized and resymbolized, and not re- 

i Oct., 1920. 



PRESENT STATUS 335 

pressed, will cause even the greatest works of man 
both physical and mental to come to naught. 

It is therefore the most urgent need of the 
present day that those qualified for research in the 
unconscious shall be given the greatest possible 
help and encouragement. Only by seeing and 
using the enormous power of the unconscious wish 
can we really attain any civilization worthy of 
the name, or a civilization that will endure more 
than a few brief centuries. The unconscious holds 
the key not only to the explanation of the " phe- 
nomena " of spiritism but of the explanation of 
all the phenomena of present day existence, and is 
the only key which will unlock the door to a digni- 
fied and worthy social life in the future. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Accidents, 121 
Ambivalence, 265 
Animism, 168 
Barker, Elsa, 315 
Belief, 247 

and Wish, 259, 307 
Compulsion, 271 
Conflict, 63 

Conscious Psychology, 114 
Consciousness, Complexity of, 
44, 99 

Narrowing of, 291 

Stream of, 1 
Death, Fear of, 248 
D6ja Vue, 26 
Emotions, 56, 204 
Fear, 65, 216, 248 
Feeling of Reality, 20, 178, 
294 
detachable, 47 

Sameness, 25 
Feelings are Sensations, 31 

and Emotions, 42 
Fission and Fusion, 136 
Hallucinations, 39 
Infantility, 331 
Introjection, 161 
Magnification, 130 
Meaning, 22 
Mechanisms, 147 

of Reading, 182 
Medium, 86, 325 
Memory, 266 

Unconscious, 157 
Miracles, 190 
Neurotic, 268 
Occurrence, 107 



Panorama, 36 
Personality, 153 
Phantasy, 321 

Pleasure-pain Principle, 240 
Postural Tonus, 202 
Projection, 165, 173 
Psychical Research, 286 
Psychoanalysis, 73 
Reading Mechanisms, 182 
Reality, Degrees of, 23 

Feeling of, 20, 34, 171 
and Images, 41 

Thinking, 176, 178, 334 
Reassociation, 106 
Repression, 78, 207, 209 
Resistance to Knowledge, 93 
Sadistic Wish, 260 
Sameness, Feeling of, 25 
"Spirit," 275 
Spiritism and War, 263 
Stoics, 213 
Taboo, 271 
Telepathy, 237 
Totem, 273 
Transference, 195 
Unconscious an Hypothesis, 117 

as an Urge, 93 

Emotions, 201 

Ideas and Feelings, 101 

Memory, 157 

Omnipercipient, 139 

Perceptions, 181 

Trends, 87 

Will, 201, 232 

Wishes, 143 
War, 263 
Will, 219 



337 



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